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Facebook Has Turned Into a Beast in Myanmar, UN Says (bbc.com)
UN investigators have accused Facebook of playing a "determining role" in stirring up hatred against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. From a report: One of the team probing possible acts of genocide said Facebook had "turned into a beast." About 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since Myanmar's military launched an operation in August against "insurgents" in Rakhine state. Facebook has said there is "no place for hate speech" on its platform. "We take this incredibly seriously and have worked with experts in Myanmar for several years to develop safety resources and counter-speech campaigns," a Facebook spokeswoman told the BBC.
The UN's Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar announced the interim findings of its investigation on Monday. During a press conference the chairman of the mission, Marzuki Darusman, said that social media had "substantively contributed to the level of acrimony" amongst the wider public, against Rohingya Muslims. "Hate speech is certainly, of course, a part of that," he added.
The UN's Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar announced the interim findings of its investigation on Monday. During a press conference the chairman of the mission, Marzuki Darusman, said that social media had "substantively contributed to the level of acrimony" amongst the wider public, against Rohingya Muslims. "Hate speech is certainly, of course, a part of that," he added.
When a majority of the people agree it is socially acceptable to hatemonger upon a targeted minority, the rule of law is rendered mute by the cacophony of voices willing to suspend decency for the brief ecstasy of a social like or two or thirty.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But you have to blame the population and government for these tragedies.
That would mean admitting that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the wrong person.
Here is a complete list of all the things necessary to turn the oppressed into oppressors:
1. Power
And it's the same everywhere.
It helped Russians violate US election law. It helps landlords illegally advertise based on race, religion, age, and gender.
How many laws does it have to break before we admit it is a criminal enterprise?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
... and it's not other social media.
It's people who take that sit seriously.
You'd think that, by now, people would know that social media is a game room.
It was intended for entertainment purposes only.
It's not Facebook.
It's us.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... the only way to win is not to play.
Ignore the baiting and keep scrolling until you get to the cat video.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This also includes unlimited fake news and propaganda though.
I don't know how this got so bad on facebook. Problems for sure are the filter bubble effect due to peers. From my experience the worst were the recommended news though, which always came from totally unreliable sources. I don't know anyone who recommended such rubbish personally. The quality seems slightly better now, but more importantly I only get articles on non-political topics now.
Islam has been a genocidial cult for the last 1400 years: how is that Facebook's fault?
What's terribly insidious about Facebook as a platform is not the speech it allows, but the speech it promotes.
Here on /., you have numerous ways about how to order the comments on the site, which ones to show/not show, etc. Facebook does not. Instead, it orders your feed based on what it thinks you will interact with -- this happens to be things which we strongly disagree with. Instead of a society where reasonable people have discussions about solutions to problems, Facebook has created a platform where it literally promotes posts that troll to increase "user engagement" -- and thus their ad revenue. Online discussions have literally become worse since Facebook has existed -- and you see it here too.
In Soviet Valley, Facebook uses you.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The Rohingyan Muslims have for years been a constant thorn in the side of Burmese people and government. The Rohingyans have been attacking and killing the Buddhists in the region for well over a century now.
This so-called "Genocide" is the response to constant acts of violent Jihad against otherwise peaceful Buddhists that have been going on for years. Shame that the media has been ignoring the plight of these peaceful Buddhists finally snapping and defending themselves against this onslaught of Arabic barbarism.
Make no mistake, the Rohingyans brought it upon themselves for their inability to peacefully live alongside Buddhists.
You let one large company control most of the mainstream media people read GLOBALLY, some fucked up shit is going to go down. Imagine how bad it would be if Facebook would have been allowed by the Indian government to offer 'their brand of internet' to the poor masses.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There is nothing peaceful about the Burmese Buddhists that that are murdering and raping *thousands* of Rohingyans. The evidence is overwhelming that the Rohingya are the victims. And their plight is severe.
It is Genocide, and due to apathy by Australia and others likely to be successful.
I do not know how you can live with yourself promoting such lies. I suppose you think that the Jews also brought the Holocaust upon themselves. And that Pol Pot was a kind man misunderstood by western media.
I have seen a lot of nonsense on Slashdot. But this is the first time I have seen something really evil.
The British must bear the responsibility on the racial / religious conflict
It was the British who promised the Rohingya migrants a muslim state inside the Buddhist Burma (the Brits had/have no right to do that, but they did) and gave weapons to the Rohingya which they used to slaughter the Buddhists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arakan_massacres_in_1942
During World War II in Burma (present-day Myanmar), Rohingya Muslims (allied with the British and promised a Muslim state in return) fought against local Rakhine Buddhists, who were allied with the Japanese
That “real place” dates back to the aftermath of World War II, when the forebears of the Rohingya appealed to Pakistan, which at the time included what is now Bangladesh, to annex their territory
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/the-rohingya-of-myanmar-pawns-in-an-anglo-chinese-proxy-war-fought-by-saudi-jihadists.html
While the ethnic conflict in Rankine state is very old, it has over the last years morphed into an Jihadist guerilla war financed and led from Saudi Arabia. The area is of geo-strategic interest:
Rakhine plays an important part in [the Chinese One Belt One Road Initiative] OBOR, as it is an exit to Indian Ocean and the location of planned billion-dollar Chinese projects—a planned economic zone on Ramree Island, and the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port, which has oil and natural gas pipelines linked with Yunnan Province’s Kunming
It is in "Western interest" to hinder China's projects in Myanmar. Inciting Jihad in Rakhine could help to achieve that. There is historic precedence for such a Rohingya - Bamar proxy war in Burma. During World War II British imperial forces incited the Rohingya Muslim in Rakhine to fight the Bamar, the dominant Burmese nationalist Buddhists allied with Japanese imperialists.
You do not need them, they are not useful, and they make existing problems worse.
As someone who found two girlfriends and several friends through social media, I strongly disagree. And yes, when I say friends, I am talking about people I meet irl constantly. Social media can be very useful if you know how to use it (which admittedly involves clicking hide a lot, because the defaults are very bad)
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I think that ShanghaiBill has the right of it. Give most people some power and they'll invariably turn into giant plonkers of some sort.
However, if we don't work Facebook into the story, we can't really push forward with censoring the internet so that bad things like this don't happen at home.
People can believe anything, some people literally anything what so ever. How ever people will also tend to believe what ever serves their own personal interest or in a twisty way, what they believe is their own personal interest. Did facebook trigger the crisis, probably but likely just triggered earlier, rather than a little latter. People struggling in that environment simply seized upon the opportunity for a competitive advantage within their society and collectively aligned their beliefs to assuage their guilt, to enable the exploitation of that competitive advantage, to gain the resource of the individuals targeted. Racism is the most effective measure of excessive competition within a society for access to resources, it is the quickest and easiest means by which to obtain competitive advantage by eliminating a lot of competition.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If the Rohingya hadn't come to Myanmar and started demanding privileges, killing and raping it would not have happened. We can see that they are up to the same tricks in Sri Lanka too. We should not criticise, in a generation's time or sooner we will have to do the same in the West or become sharia hell holes.
700,000 people show up unannounced in your country and Facebook is the problem? The 700,000 people are the problem! It doesn't help that a lot of their cultural practices are EXTREMELY disapproved of by the rest of the world.
Yes. People *are* the problem. And in a situation with a kid with matches, the kid is the problem. It still makes sense not to give the kid matches in the first place. Not that we can prevent people from doing stupid things in a free society, I get that. But we can still hold the person who gives matches to the kid accountable, can't we?
The problems reported are in the country they came from, not where they fled to. In other words, the Facebook problem is what forced them to cross the border.
And how it created so much strife by facilitating communication.
Make a conscious decision and do not use social media platforms.
The discussions I have on Facebook are not entirely different than the ones I have on Slashdot. The big difference is that I know the people I'm talking to, so it's rare that things devolve into name-calling and trolling like I see so often here. Facebook is 100% what you make it. (Plus ads.) I see posts from CNN, CNN International, BBC News and other things I find interesting. If you don't want to see pictures of people's dinners, it's not hard to tailor your friends list. I just checked my last few comments on FB. They were on John Oliver's piece on Cryptocurrencies that he put out Sunday, MoviePass tracking (and the email from their CEO correcting what he calls misreporting), condolences on my sister's dog passing, and a post concerning the anti-vaxx religious movement. Except for my sister's dog, I wouldn't be surprised to find any of that here. My circle of friends on FB are just as bright and interesting as the Slashdot horde and considerably more civil. I understand the objections to FB that I hear so often here, but it's not useless unless you've tailored it to be useless.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
A citation, really? Do you habitually stick your head in the sand?
A specific example of attempted genocide by Islamic invaders. ...with the Muslim camps being described as building "towers of skulls of the infidels" on hillocks.
Here's another reference for your citation list.
another one.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
(I reserve the right to amend that in the future if a previous genocide gets blamed on Facebook).
First, who is saying to ban free speech? Knock it off with that stupid strawman.
It's all about attention. Zeynep Tufekci writes and speaks very well about this.
There's a difference between allowing hate speech on the internet, and promoting it as the top item in your newsfeeds. The first is not the issue--it's the second. Combine that with many poor people around the world cannot access the internet, but only Facebook, then Facebook IS the internet for them, and what Facebook shows them is the problem. And people who've not used the internet before don't know to be suspicious of everything. And Facebook wants to show you stuff to outrage you, to make you read more ads. And what outrages more than "news" saying Muslims are murdering your neighbors. If that inspires Buddhists to actually murder thousands of people in revenge for things that never happened, well, that's just collateral damage. We gotta sell ads, and free speech, we're not to blame, we try to take down fake news after any massacres, etc.
Facebook is just insanely good at spreading evil. It may have other uses. I think the evil on Facebook exceeds the good, especially since there are other ways to get the good parts, and the evil is getting better as using Facebook.
That would mean admitting that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the wrong person
That's not true at all, from everything I read on the page you linked the prize was not given to the wrong person. She did indeed work very hard for democracy and human rights, in a nonviolent way. As was stated twenty-five years ago when she was awarded the prize.
If the point of your comment was that an abused person is more likely to turn into an abuser when given the opportunity, well that's a well-known phenomenon.
I don't usually read or reply to ACs, but I believe you are trying to state something fundamental, yet your command of English may not be quite up to the task:
Stop relating religion to nation!!! ...
..snip..
As political doctrine isliam proclaim that all Muslim are "one nation" this is the first place why other religions can't live together with muslims!!!
I think this is what you intended:
Islam proclaims that all Muslim are "one nation". This is why a non-Muslim minority cannot live in peace with a Muslim majority.
In other words, the Muslim will kill any other culture or belief system with "death by a thousand cuts", until they have the numbers to simply destroy all others.
It does seem that Christianity is tolerated significantly better than Islam in Myanmar.
The fact that Christianity in Myanmar is tolerated at all is significant, since this is right next door to some horrible atrocities involving Christianity (Taiping Rebellion).
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
My biggest fear realized! What a fool I am! My FB account has links to my family, my friends! They could ALL fall victim to... What exactly?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Here is a complete list of all the things necessary to turn the oppressed into oppressors:
1. Power
That's a complete list only if you assume that all people fall into one of the three categories: assholes, dicks or cunts.
"All people" naturally includes you and your mother as well.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That might last a week or even a month before it's just Troll Central. That's a fate Facebook has to avoid to remain something close to profitable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes