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

Simple solution: Pull Facebook out of Myanmar

[Rick Schumann]

If Facebook is basically fighting a flood with a broom then perhaps they should just not allow anyone in Myanmar to use Facebook for a while. Assuming, that is, that Facebook is actually serious about prohibiting "violent or dehumanizing" attacks on ethnic groups, as they say.

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

[Nidi62]

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

The number of Burmese-speaking Reuters employees (that the Myanmar government hasn't arrested yet) is greater than the number of Burmese-speaking Facebook employees? Hence why Facebook is hiring an outside firm.