Zuckerberg On Facebook's Role In Ethnic Cleansing In Myanmar: 'It's a Real Issue' (vox.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Facebook's fake news problems extend far beyond Russian trolls interfering in U.S. elections. Overseas, false stories have turned into tools of political warfare -- most notably in Myanmar, where government forces have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, the country's Muslim minority group. In an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed Facebook's role in fueling and inciting anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiment. "The Myanmar issues have, I think, gotten a lot of focus inside the company," Zuckerberg said. "And they're real issues and we take this really seriously."

He recalled one incident where Facebook detected that people were trying to spread "sensational messages" through Facebook Messenger to incite violence on both sides of the conflict. He acknowledged that in such instances, it's clear that people are using Facebook "to incite real-world harm." But in this case, at least, the messages were detected and stopped from going through. "This is certainly something that we're paying a lot of attention to," Zuckerberg continued. "It's a real issue, and we want to make sure that all of the tools that we're bringing to bear on eliminating hate speech, inciting violence, and basically protecting the integrity of civil discussions that we're doing in places like Myanmar, as well as places like the U.S. that do get a disproportionate amount of the attention."

Comments

Re:"protecting the integrity of civil discussions

[hey!]

Well, I don't know who you are, so I can't judge the truth of the statement that "we" are able to tell the difference between reason and hate-mongering propaganda, but if by "we" you mean "people in general", your argument doesn't hold up.

When I was a teenager I had dinner at the house of an older Jewish couple; the other guests were an elderly German couple who knew my Jewish friends through classical music circles. The German couple was old enough to remember living under the Nazis, and when the conversation turned that way these very nice people made it very clear that in the 1940s they'd have turned in any Jews they'd known were hiding. They wanted me to understand that even respectable, cultured, intelligent people can be brainwashed.

Look around you. People are perfectly willing to go along with stupid, vicious, even incoherent ideas as long as there are a lot of other people doing it. Most people's behavior isn't governed by religion, or their professed philosophical principles; it's governed by what appears normal to them.

The reason that government censorship doesn't work isn't because people are wise and thoughtful; it's because government censorship spitting into the wind of perceived normalcy. However, shaming racist bullshit and shunning the people repeating it is very effective.