Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Which raises the question, What was Facebook’s role in all of this? The UN report on the human rights violations in Myanmar devotes over twenty pages to the critical role Facebook played in spreading hate. It catalogs the different kinds of derogatory language investigators found in posts, memes, and cartoons—including several variations on the ethnic slur kalar, the word our team tried and failed to ban for years because we couldn’t convince the decision makers at Facebook to take action. It lists the different anti-Muslim narratives found on Facebook: posts that portray Muslims and Rohingya as a threat to the Buddhist character of the country and Burmese racial purity; posts that characterize Muslims as terrorists, criminals, and rapists; posts that claim they “breed like rabbits” and will overtake the population. Organizations with an explicitly racist agenda like MaBaTha, led by the extremist monk Wirathu, have an active Facebook presence. Death threats, harassment, and calls for violence aren’t just against Muslims “but also against moderate commentators, human rights defenders and ordinary people who have views that differ from the official line.” All of these are issues Facebook had been aware of for years. The UN investigators point out many of the other issues we’d tried and failed to convince Facebook’s leaders to address: the woefully inadequate content moderation Facebook provided for Myanmar; the lack of moderators who “understand Myanmar language and its nuan...