One easy thing Facebook should do in Myanmar
In March, human-rights investigators from the United Nations found that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar, fueling ethnic violence that has spurred more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar’s Rakhine state into neighboring Bangladesh. The report, which came amid growing concerns about the way that social networks can incite violence, contained some of the most grave charges leveled against Facebook to date.
Chastened by the UN’s findings, Facebook quietly commissioned a study of its own — which it then released on the evening before the US midterm elections, when very few people would be paying attention. The report, which was conducted by the nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), is a 62-page document that sets out to understand the dimensions of Facebook’s challenge in Myanmar and offer solutions to mitigate it.
After the dust from the midterms more or less cleared, I read the report. And while I spend more time reading hot takes than nonprofit takes-by-committee, I was struck by the degree to which a report that calls itself a “human rights impact assessment” does so little to assess the impact of Facebook on human rights in Myanmar.
The authors report speaking with about 60 people in Myanmar for their report, but they fail to explore any specific instances of hate speech on the platform or the resulting harms. Their analysis is limited to high-level, who-can-really-say equivocating. Its approach to understanding the situation on the ground in Myanmar appears to be primarily anecdotal, and its conclusions are the same as anyone who read a news wire story about the issue this spring.
“Though the actual relationship between content posted on Facebook and offline harm is not fully understood, Facebook has become a means for those seeking to spread hate and cause harm, and posts have been linked to offline violence,” the authors write, in one of many cases in which the passive voice serves to paper over their refusal to investigate.
I began reading the report in the hopes that it would clarify the connection between hate speech posted on social media and real-world violence. We are starving for knowledge about how unique platform mechanics such as share buttons and encryption contribute to lynch mobs. But instead, the authors choose to explore the current political dynamics in Myanmar at great length, and ultimately offer Facebook a to-do list of tasks that will let the company continue operating with minimal disruption to its business.
Most reports generated by consultants are destined to ride out eternity inside a neglected drawer, and BSR’s contribution to the Myanmar situation deserves a similar fate. (The nonprofit did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.)
Fortunately, though, this week we got a second report on Facebook and Myanmar — and this one, I thought, was much more useful. It comes from the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Unlike BSR, the UN report asks why Facebook would enter Myanmar — or any other country rife with conflict — without first understanding how it would moderate content on the platform. They write: