Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup

tags

Facebook

next: Part II: The Crisis

Notes

Meta had been receiving detailed and increasingly desperate warnings about Facebook’s role as an accelerant of genocidal propaganda in Myanmar for six years.

sudden flowering of the internet in Myanmar in the 2010s is that in the beginning, it was incredibly welcome and so filled with hope.

in Myanmar, even back in 2012 and 2013, being online meant being on Facebook.

when Myanmar’s government opens up to two foreign telecom services, the stronger of the two, Norway’s Telenor, “zero-rates” Facebook.

Facebook bought the privilege of being the internet for the majority of languages in the world.

It’s hard to overstate how contested those basic facts are within Myanmar itself, where successive governments have rejected any recognition of Rohingya existence, let along legitimacy, referring to them instead as illegal “Bengali” immigrants.

although Ma Thida Htwe was clearly murdered, both the rape allegation and ethnic origin of the suspected culprits remain in doubt, and that, “In the following days and weeks, it was mainly the rape allegation, more than the murder, which was used to incite violence and hatred against the Rohingya.”

More than 100,000 people, most of them Rohinyga, are forced from their homes.

the 2012 episodes of communal violence mark the turning point of Myanmar’s slide into intense anti-Rohingya rhetoric, persecution, and, ultimately, genocide.

We used to live together peacefully alongside the other ethnic groups in Myanmar. Their intentions were good to the Rohingya, but the government was against us. The public used to follow their religious leaders, so when the religious leaders and government started spreading hate speech on Facebook, the minds of the people changed.

western observers may have underestimated the role of secondhand transmission of internet-circulated ideas, including printed copies of internet propaganda

Wirathu speaks placidly about the possibility of interfaith problem-solving and multi-ethnic peace—and then, with no transition or change of tone, about Muslims “devouring the Burmese people, destroying Buddhist and Buddhist order

almost every major outbreak of communal violence since October 2012 in Rakhine state has been preceded by a 969-sponsored preaching tour in the area, usually by [Wirathu] himself.

one of the examples Schissler gives Meta was a Burmese Facebook Page called, “We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs.” 48 None of this seems to get through to the Meta employees on the line, who are interested in…cyberbullying.

hate speech seemed to be a “low priority” for Facebook, and that the situation in Myanmar, “was seen as a connectivity opportunity rather than a big pressing problem.”

On the third day of rioting, the government gets tired of waiting and blocks access to Facebook in Mandalay. The block works—the riots died down. And the Deloitte guy’s inbox suddenly fills with emails from Meta staffers wanting to know why Facebook has been blocked.

Garlick discusses Meta’s policies and promises to…speed up the translation of Facebook’s Community Standards (its basic content rules) into Burmese. That single piece of translation work—Facebook’s main offering in response to internationally significant ethnic violence about which the company has been warned for two years—takes Meta fourteen months to accomplish

Facebook has a single Burmese-speaking moderator—a contractor based in Dublin—to review everything that comes in. The Burmese-language reporting tool is, as Htaike Htaike Aung and Victoire Rio put it in their timeline, “a road to nowhere.”

Schissler has lunch with a few Meta employees, and one of them asked Schissler if he thought Facebook could contribute to a genocide in Myanmar, to which Schissler responded, “Absolutely.” Afterwards, Schissler tells Frenkel and Kang, one Facebook employee loudly remarks, “He can’t be serious. That’s just not possible.”

in 2015, Facebook employed a total of two (2) Burmese-speaking moderators, expanding to four (4) by the year’s end.

David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.

Meta decided not to dramatically scale up moderation capacity, to permanently ban the known worst actors, or to make fundamental product-design changes to reliably deviralize posts inciting hatred and violence. Instead, in 2016, it was time to get way more people in Myanmar onto Facebook.