Facebook’s cluelessness helped amplify Myanmar tensions

The San Francisco–based nonprofit was tasked with investigating Facebook's role in enabling political violence in Myanmar.

The Republic of the Union of Myanmar, formerly Burma, is a country in Southeast Asia bordered by India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos and China.

The UN Human Rights Council has said that the country's military has played on these tensions to create violence and justify its power.

Facebook is also used as a platform for extortion, with individuals threatening to post Photoshopped images of women onto porn sites unless paid.

A mirror letter was sent to Muslim groups, warning them that a violent attack from militant Buddhist groups was forthcoming. Facebook's failure to deal with the letter led to a personal apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that the company would hire more Burmese-speaking moderators.

The interfaith tensions have been used by Myanmar's military to justify human rights violations of both Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims. Violations of the former group include forced labor, land seizure and rape, while the latter have been declared essentially stateless people.

The report highlights the fine line that Facebook has to walk when it comes to dealing with abuses like this in the future.

But that could lead to reprisals by local leaders, as well as the seizure and surveillance of users by hostile governments.

Its failure to appreciate the consequences of its actions has real effects -- a lesson that it apparently keeps needing to learn.

Original article
Author: Engadget

Engadget is the original home for technology news and reviews. Since its founding in 2004, we've grown from an exhaustive source for consumer tech news to a global multimedia organization covering the intersection of technology, gaming and entertainment.

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