A Look at Facebook's Presence in Myanmar Where Despite Public Outcries, Facebook is Still Struggling To Contain Hate Speech (reuters.com)

More than 1,000 anti-Rohingya posts featuring calls for their murder among other hate speech were live on Facebook last week, Reuters reported Wednesday. A probe by the news agency indicates that the network is still being used to encourage violence against the Muslim group in Myanmar despite the tech firm promising to tackle the issue. Reuters reports some of the material had been online for six years. Facebook's rules prohibit "violent or dehumanizing" attacks on ethnic groups. However, the US-based firm mostly relies on users to flag related offending posts rather than hunting them out itself, in part because its software has not had enough training to reliably interpret Burmese text.

Vice reports that Facebook has hired an outside company to look into its role in spreading hate speech and enabling ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.

Comments

Re:There is no such thing as hate speech.

[Anonymous Coward]

While not hate speech per se, speech can have a clear threat of action and inherent chilling effect based on specificity.

"I hate all gays" is fine, it is a bad opinion but whatever.
"All gays can die in a fire, and I would be the first to light a match" is shitty to say but cool legally, because it isn't specific.
"Let's all go to Washington DC and hang gays in front of the White House on the first of the month" is clearly a threat.
"I hope their are no gays in my neighborhood *picture of a shotgun*" is clearly a threat as well.

There needs to be better definitions in certain cases though. Calling someone gay when in the middle of a fight? Probably not hate speech, though many lawyers would go that route. Saying "this is what happens to gay people" when beating someone up probably is.

Re:Funny how we never get Slashdot stories...

[harrkev]

Probably because Muslims are more often the victim than the perpetrator. There's a lot of countries in Africa too where xians are performing ethnic cleansing on Muslim populations.

You might want to research. The west practices tolerance, but in areas that are majority Muslim, not so much.

Here, you can find a list of countries that allow the DEATH PENALTY for apostasy and blasphemy. You will never guess the dominant religion for most of them... http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

Well, "blasphemy" laws can be applied to pretty much anybody that you disagree with. In Pakistan, a Christian woman was pretty much railroaded and sentenced to death, despite the lack of any actual evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One telling quote (from the article):

In December 2010, a month after Noreen's conviction, a Muslim cleric announced a 500,000 Pakistani rupee award (the equivalent of $10,000)[7] to anyone who would kill her. One survey reported that around 10 million Pakistanis had said that they would be willing to personally kill her out of either religious conviction or for the reward.

Also, even if you DON'T actually commit blasphemy, here is a list of 13 countries where begin an Atheist can get you killed. You get three guesses about the dominant religion for 12 of these countries (the 13th country, Nigeria, is evenly divided between Christian and Islam). Yes, being the wrong religion (or lack thereof) is LEGAL grounds for execution. https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

Another page with a similar map: https://www.indy100.com/articl...

But as to who is the VICTIM of persecution, I will leave this article (cliff notes: Christians). The source data appears to be Pew (who is generally regarded as unbiased), but you can analyze the data for skew yourself.

https://www.express.co.uk/news...

What bugs me the most . . .

[sgt_doom]

Not that I am unsympathetic to the slaughter of muslims in Myanmar and the destruction of their homes their, but there has been a lengthy genocide against the (mostly Christian) Kachin people in that country, and there is little reporting about it, most definitely NOT in Amerika.

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Re:If Reuters can find it, why can't Facebook?

[UnknownSoldier]

Hate speech vs free speech ...

*facepalm*

Censored Speech vs Free Speech ...

FTFY.

There is NO such thing as "hate speech". As soon as you start censoring contrary opinion based on artificial labels you no longer have free speech -- you have censored speech which is one step removed from fascism. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away!

As George Carlin summarized:

Political Correctness is fascism pretending to be Manners" -- George Carlin

Jordan Peterson points out the same thing -- Facebook censoring SOME speech and not others is a very bad idea.

"@0:29 Now they have decided that they are ethically responsible for the content on their platforms. So good luck with that decision. Because they have an awful lot of content and drawing the lines is going to be extraordinary difficult thing to do.
@0:45 Basically, the way these companies were setup up to begin with is that people could post content and then other people could watch it, and basically decide by their viewing, they could value the content by their proclivity to view.
And now they have decided as a consequence of this decision that they are going to be in the business of arbitrarily determining what should and shouldn't be presented for public viewing and they'll never run out of decisions to make."

Liberals wanting "tolerance" have swung so far around that they have now become conservatives -- intolerant of anything they disagree with.

As Francois-Marie Arouet famously said:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Without the ability to communicate about a subject there is no opportunity to learn about it.

Without an opportunity to comment and criticize there is no growth.

Why is this an issue? Because censorship is a slippery slope.

As Martin Niemoller famously said:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

History has shown this time and time again.

Paraphrasing another YouTuber who summarized philosopher John Stuart Mill:

If we censor hate speech our fundamental beliefs of what is right and wrong are not tested.

If our beliefs are aren't argued against then we don't attempt to rationalize what we believe to be true.

We don't think about why our beliefs are right.

When we don't question our beliefs we don't think about them.

And when we don't think about our beliefs we don't learn new things. We don't advance and improve our thoughts about what is right and wrong.

He argued that even if someone's argument is wrong it still serves a purpose of making us rationalize and check our beliefs and even improve them.

Being able to listen to an argument that is wrong lets us understand what makes an argument wrong and improve our own beliefs from learning from someone else's failure.

People have forgotten:

What you resists, persists

The truth is:

Only children censor.
Adults communicate and even laugh at taboo subjects.

Censorship is NOT the solution -- it is precisely the problem.