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

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

So in Myanmar, if you’re on the internet, you’re on Facebook, and because of this, Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous.

I get an email telling me the junta wants us to remove Wirathu’s posts about this alleged rape. Because they’re causing real-world violence—riots are ongoing, Buddhist mobs are attacking Muslim shops, people are dying—the posts seem like a clear violation of our standards. But the content operations team—which is based in Dublin—doesn’t want to take down the posts.

This cannot be the system Facebook relies on when people are dying. If posts are causing riots in the streets, we can’t be depending on some random contractor in Ireland who’s out to dinner and can’t find his laptop.

I point out that this doesn’t matter under our own guidelines, which state clearly that we remove content “when we perceive a genuine risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety.” Triggering real-world violence like riots violates our rules.

At this point in 2014, Myanmar is too explosive—grappling with hate speech, fake news, and mob violence, struggling to become a democracy—for us to treat it like any other country. Millions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook’s operations team.

And—biggest and most surprising of all—Facebook is incompatible with the Burmese language.

Facebook’s site could be translated into Burmese at any point. It’s just … not a priority.

In addition to all this, Myanmar is one of the few countries that doesn’t run on Unicode. This Unicode is the universal stand...

Rape and other forms of sexual violence were perpetrated on a massive scale.… Sometimes up to 40 women and girls were raped or gang-raped together.… Rapes were often in public spaces and in front of families and the community, maximizing humiliation and trauma. Mothers were gang raped in front of young children, who were severely injured and in some instances killed.…

Over seven hundred thousand Muslims fled the country.

What the world will learn later is that the military had set up a massive operation—at least seven hundred people—to spread misinformation and hate on Facebook. This was revealed by a reporter named Paul Mozur in the New York Times.

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.

the fact that the Burmese language isn’t rendered in Unicode; the lack of a clear system to report hate speech and alarming unresponsiveness when it is reported.

Community operations had written an internal report noting that forty-five of the one hundred most active hate speech accounts in Southeast Asia are in Myanmar.

The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there.

Joel was a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House. An issue in Syria would be met by a wave of his hand and, “Drop a bomb on it. I don’t care.” A joke, but also who he was. He was the man in charge of those countries for Facebook. And when it came to Myanmar, those people just didn’t matter to him. He couldn’t be bothered. There was no greater principle ever offered.

And it wasn’t just Joel. None of the senior leaders—Elliot or Sheryl or Mark—thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.

Joel’s responsible both for lobbying government and for making key content and product decisions that keep Facebook in good standing with the Trump administration.

The DNA of the company remains the same. And the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become. I experienced the first tentative meetings between Mark and world leaders. And witnessed the exploration and embrace of power that has continued to expand.

And now we’re living in the world that has been shaped by these people and their lethal carelessness.