Will Facebook own up to Myanmar?

20 November 2018

Social media drove the Arab Spring, the story goes. If it weren’t for viral posts in Tunisia setting off a cascade of dominoes across the region change would never have arrived. For a brief period, the arrival of social media giant Facebook in countries with low connectivity or strict freedom of the press and internet meant change was afoot.

Facebook launched its controversial Free Basics program in Myanmar mid-2016. This would allow low-income Burmese to access the internet far more cheaply than previously and saw millions jump onto the platform. By 2017, 20 million accounts had been made in Myanmar. It coincided with the worst flare-up in violence in the northern state of Rakhine, with hundreds of thousands of Rohingya minority refugees fleeing across the border into Bangladesh amid reports of killings, sexual violence and destruction of homes at the hands of the military. There are multiple causes for what has been called a genocide by the United Nations, but one thing is clear. Facebook has been a contributor, a UN report declared earlier this year.

Facebook faces two monumental charges when it comes to its operations in Myanmar. Firstly, it allowed hate speech and hoaxes about the Rohingya Muslim-minority to proliferate. The Rohingya have long been demonised in Buddhist-majority Myanmar as an Islamic terror threat or ‘Bengalis’ that is, non-Burmese illegal immigrants.

A Reuters report in August explored the murky web of Facebook-based hate speech against the community and found thousands of examples. Some of these predated the current crisis but other posts were made at the peak of violence in August and September last year. References to ‘doing what Hitler did to the Jews’ and calls to 'destroy their race' underscore how violent hate for the minority has become.

When talk of the violent rhetoric online went mainstream, Facebook pledged to step up in weeding out particularly vitriolic users and pages as well as introduce greater moderation to comments. This has so far been a spectacular failure. The social media giant has said efforts to expand moderation have been stymied by difficulties in finding candidates who speak both Burmese and English fluently, which is understandable perhaps since the reforms were rolled out in the Singapore office. This becomes much less understandable after Facebook officials met with Myanmar’s Ministry of Information who suggested an office be opened in-country, only to be declined.

The second problem is one not even

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Will Facebook own up to Myanmar?

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