Facebook pursued in the High Court for complicity in Rohingya Genocide

ISLAM
Carl Arrindell

Two Dublin based law firms – KOD Lyons and Abbey Law, last week launched between them, 17 lawsuits in the Irish High Court, alleging that the social media platform Meta, should pay significant damages for its culpability in the genocide in Myanmar of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.

စစ်ကောင်စီက အရှေ့တီမော သံတမန်တွေကို တိုင်းပြည်က နှင်၊ ရိုဟင်ဂျာ လူမျိုးတုံး သတ်ဖြတ်မှုနဲ့ Facebook ဆိုရှယ် မီဒီယာ

MoeMaKa

မြန်မာနွေဦး ခရိုနီကယ် - သြဂုတ် ၂၆ မြင်ကွင်း
(မိုးမခ) ဩဂုတ် ၂၇၊ ၂၀၂၃

မကြာသေးခင် ဇူလိုင်လ ၁ ရက်နေ့က အရှေ့တီမောနိုင်ငံရဲ့ အစိုးရသစ် ကျမ်းသစ္စာကျိန်ဆိုပွဲ အခမ်း အနားကို အမျိုးသားညီညွတ်ရေး အစိုးရရဲ့ နိုင်ငံခြားရေး ဝန်ကြီး ဒေါ်ဇင်မာအောင်ကို တရားဝင် ဖိတ် ကြားတာတွေ လုပ်ခဲ့ပြီး သမ္မတ၊ ဝန်ကြီးချုပ်တို့လို အရှေ့တီမောနိုင်ငံရဲ့ အကြီးအကဲဖြစ်သူတွေက လူ သိရှင်ကြား လက်ခံတွေ့ဆုံတာတွေ လုပ်ဆောင်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ တဖန် အရှေ့တီမောနိုင်ငံအနေနဲ့အာဆီယံ အဖွဲ့ ဝင်ခွင့်လျှောက်ထားတာ နဲ့ပတ်သက်ပြီး မြန်မာ့နိုင်ငံရဲ့ ပြဿနာကို ဖြေရှင်းနိုင်မှ အာဆီယံကို အ ဖွဲ့ ဝင်အဖြစ် ဝင်ရောက်မယ်ဆိုတဲ့ ပြောဆိုချက်တွေ ပေါ်ထွက်လာပြီး သီတင်းပတ်အနည်းငယ်အကြာ မှာ အခုလို စစ်ကောင်စီက ရန်ကုန်မှာရှိတဲ့ အရှေ့တီမော နိုင်ငံသံတမန်တွေကို ယခုလကုန်မှာ မြန်မာ နိုင်ငံက ထွက်ခွာသွားဖို့ အသိပေး အကြောင်းကြားလိုက်တာ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။

Facebook owner has moral obligation to compensate Rohingya

ARAB NEWS
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
June 07, 2023 

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar get off a boat after crossing into Bangladesh through the Bay of Bengal. (Reuters/File)

The Rohingya crisis, characterized by widespread violence, displacement and human rights abuses, has been one of the most severe humanitarian emergencies of our time. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through social media platforms, it is crucial to hold technology companies accountable for their role in amplifying hate speech and misinformation and facilitating violence against vulnerable communities. In this context, Meta, the owner of Facebook, should take responsibility and provide compensation to the Rohingya people for the harm caused by the misuse of its platform.

Meta Should Pay Reparations to Rohingya Refugees, Rights Group Says

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio 

September 30, 2022

Amnesty International claims that Facebook was aware that its algorithms were amplifying harmful anti-Rohingya hate speech in Myanmar, but still did nothing to stop it.

Facebook’s parent company Meta should pay reparations to Rohingya communities who were driven out of western Myanmar in 2017, given the role that it played in enabling the campaign of ethnic cleansing, the human rights group Amnesty International said in a report published yesterday.

In a new report published yesterday, Amnesty claims that Facebook’s “dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit… substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017.”

မြန်မာစစ်တပ်ကျူးလွန်ခဲ့သည့် စစ်ရာဇဝတ်မှု အထောက်အ ထားများကို ဖေ့စ်ဘွတ်က ကုလစုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေးသူထံ ပေးအပ်

DVB 

13 September, 2022

မြန်မာစစ်ခေါင်းဆောင်တွေကို စစ်ရာဇဝတ်မှုနဲ့ လူမျိုးတုန်းသတ်ဖြတ်မှုတွေနဲ့ စွဲချက်တင်နိုင်ဖို့ အထောက်အကူဖြစ်စေမယ့် အချက်အလက် အထောက်အထားပေါင်း သန်းနဲ့ချီပြီး ဖေ့စ်ဘွတ်ခ်က ပေးအပ်ခဲ့တယ်လို့ ကုလသမ ဂ္ဂရဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံဆိုင်ရာစုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေးသူများအဖွဲ့ခေါင်းဆောင်က ပြောပါတယ်။

၂၀၁၈ ခုနှစ်က စတင်ကာ ကုလသမဂ္ဂလူ့အခွင့်အရေးကောင်စီက ဖွဲ့စည်းခဲ့တဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံဆိုင်ရာ လွတ်လပ်သောစုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေးရေးယန္တရား (IIMM) အဖွဲ့ဟာ နိုင်ငံတွင်း၊ ဒေသတွင်းနဲ့ နိုင်ငံတကာ တရားရုံးတွေမှာ မြန်မာစစ်တပ်ကို တရားစွဲဆိုနိုင်ရေး အချက်အလက်အမှုတွဲတွေ ပြင်ဆင်တည်ဆောက်နေတာ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။

‘Kill more’: Facebook fails to detect hate against Rohingya

NEW YORK POST
Associated Press
March 22, 2022 

Rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya, which were all approved for publishing. AP 

 JAKARTA, Indonesia — A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them.

The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published.

 

Facebook's 'Double Standard' On Hate Speech Against Russians

Market Screener
03/21/2022

Meta's decision to allow hate speech against Russians is troubling and can impact other conflict areas, say experts

Facebook's decision to allow hate speech against Russians due to the war in Ukraine breaks its own rules on incitement, and shows a "double standard" that could hurt users caught in other conflicts, digital rights experts and activists said.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms will temporarily allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, Reuters reported last week.

It will also allow praise for a right-wing battalion "strictly in the context of defending Ukraine", in a decision that experts say demonstrates the platform's bias.

The move represents a "glaring" double standard when set against Meta's failure to curb hate speech in other war zones, said Marwa Fatafta at digital rights group Access Now.

Facebook failed to detect calls for violence against Rohingya after it played role in genocide, report finds

Morning Star
Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Rohingya Muslim children who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, wait squashed against each other to receive food handouts distributed to children and women by a Turkish aid agency at Thaingkhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, Saturday, October 21, 2017

FACEBOOK failed to detect dangerous hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya people, years after such posts were found to have played a determining role in the genocide against the Muslim minority, a report has found.

Rohingya lawsuit against Facebook a 'wake-up call' for social media

Eco-Bussiness
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Dec. 14, 2021

Will the landmark suit, which argues that the spread of hate speech on the platform facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, be a turning point for Big Tech?

Rohingya refugees sit on a makeshift boat as they are interrogated by the Border Guard Bangladesh after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, at Shah Porir Dwip near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh November 9, 2017. Image: REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar/File Photo

A landmark lawsuit by Rohingya refugees against Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, is a “wake-up call” for social media firms and a test case for courts to limit their immunity, human rights and legal experts said.

The $150 billion class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that Facebook’s failure to police content and its platform’s design contributed to violence against the Rohingya community.

British lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office.

Rohingya lawsuit ‘wake-up call’ for social media

GULF TIMES

Rina Chandran and Avi Asher
Schapiro/Bangkok/Los Angeles
December 14 2021

FINDINGS: United Nations human rights investigators said in 2018 that the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fuelled the violence against the Rohingya 

 

A landmark lawsuit by Rohingya refugees against Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, is a “wake-up call” for social media firms and a test case for courts to limit their immunity, human rights and legal experts said.

The $150bn class-action complaint, filed in California last Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that Facebook’s failure to police content and its platform’s design contributed to violence against the Rohingya community.

ေဖ့စ္ဘုတ္ကို ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား တရားစြဲမႈ အလား အလာ

VOA
ဗီြအိုေအၿမန္မာပိုင္း
ဝင္းမင္း
11 ဒီဇင္ဘာ၊ 2021  

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ ကုတုပေလာင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္းမွ ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား။ (ဧၿပီ ၁၊ ၂၀၂၀)

႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္တဲ့အထိ အမုန္းတရားေတြ ျပန႔္ပြားေစတဲ့ ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပမႈေတြ၊ သတင္း မွား ေတြကို ေဖ့စ္ဘုတ္က ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ အေရးယူ မကိုင္တြယ္ခဲ့ဘူးလို႔ စြပ္စြဲၿပီး ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြက Meta ကုမၸဏီကို ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၀ ဘီလ်ံ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပးဖို႔ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုမွာ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ တနလၤာေန႔က တရားစြဲတင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီစြဲဆိုမႈေၾကာင့္ လူအေျမာက္အျမား ေသဆုံးခဲ့တဲ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္အေပၚ နည္းပညာကုမၸဏီႀကီး တခုအတြက္ နာမည္ဆိုး က်န္ခဲ့လိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ၿဗိတိန္အေျခစိုက္ ျမန္မာ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးထြန္းခင္က ေျပာပါတယ္။ ကိုဝင္းမင္းက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္း တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

Rohingya refugees seek Facebook action over hate speech

RTE

By Colm Ó Mongáin

Deputy Foreign Editor
Thursday, 9 Dec 2021

 

The complaint has been made by young people who live in Cox's Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh

 

A group of young Rohingya refugees have submitted a complaint about Facebook Ireland to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The 16 men and women are also seeking reparations from the social media platform, which is now known as Meta, for carrying material inciting hatred against Rohingya people.

The inflammatory material was posted during a period of violent attacks by the country's army and armed militias from 2017.

Can Facebook be blamed for pogroms against Rohingyas in Myanmar?

THE ECONOMIC
Dec 11th 2021 edition

 

Lawsuits in America and Britain seek billions of dollars in damages

THAT FACEBOOK was used to spread rhetoric that incited carnage in Myanmar is hardly up for debate. According to the lead author of a UN report published in 2018 the firm’s platform played a “determining role” in the violence inflicted on Rohingya Muslims by marauding Buddhists. Facebook acknowledges that it did not do enough to prevent its services from being abused. But whether it is liable for what happened is a trickier question.

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It may soon be answered. A legal campaign is under way on both sides of the Atlantic. It claims that Facebook, now renamed Meta, should be held liable for allowing users to spread such content during the Rohingya genocide. A letter delivered to Facebook’s London offices on December 6th gave the firm notice of intent to sue it in the High Court. That suit will be on behalf of Rohingyas living everywhere in the world outside America, including Bangladesh, where 1m or so dwell as refugees.

Rohingya genocide: Facebook faces massive $200 bn legal action in UK, US

Ahamedabad Mirror
06-12-2021

Rohingya genocide: Facebook faces massive $200 bn legal action in UK, US 

 

Lawyers in the UK and the US on Monday initiated coordinated legal campaigns against Facebook, now known as Meta, on behalf of Rohingya Muslims for its alleged role in facilitating the genocide perpetrated by the Myanmar regime and extremist civilians against the Rohingya people.  

 

According to the lawyers, Facebook contributed to the 2017 genocide of Rohingya Muslims by allowing hate speech against the persecuted minority to be propagated in Myanmar. The United Nations had described the violence as "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၀ ဘီလ်ံရလိုမႈျဖင့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ားက Facebook ကို တရားစြဲ

Myanmar Now
Published on Dec 7, 2021

 ၂၀၁၇ ေအာက္တိုဘာလအတြင္းက ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ေၾကာင့္ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံဘက္ျခမ္းသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္း ေရွာင္လာသည့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား။ (ဓာတ္ပုံ - EPA/EFE)

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဆန္႔က်င္ေရး အမုန္းစကားမ်ားကို ထိန္းကြပ္ရန္ ပ်က္ကြက္သည္ဆိုကာ နစ္နာေၾကး အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၀ ဘီလ်ံရလိုမႈျဖင့္ Facebook လူမႈကြန္ရက္ပိုင္ရွင္ Meta ကုမၸဏီကို ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ားက တရားစြဲဆိုလိုက္သည္ဟု ရိုက္တာသတင္းဌာနက ေရးသားသည္။

ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းက အမုန္းစကားပြားမႈေတြအတြက္ ရိုဟင္ ဂ်ာ ေတြက ေဖ့ဘြတ္ခ္ကို ေဒၚလာဘီလ်ံ ၁၅၀ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးရ ဖို႔ တရားစြဲ

B B C

ဘီဘီစီၿမန္မာပိုင္း
07 December 2021

 လူမႈကြန္ယက္ကုမၸဏီႀကီးေဖ့ဘြတ္ခ္ဟာ သူ႔ရဲ့လူမႈကြန္ယက္ေတြေပၚမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ အမုန္းစကား ပြားတာေတြကို ခြင့္ျပဳတယ္လို႔ဆိုၿပီး ၿဗိတိန္နဲ႔အေမရိကန္က ဒါဇင္နဲ႔ခ်ီတဲ့ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြက ေဖ့ဘြတ္ခ္ကိုတရား စြဲလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ေဖ့ဘြတ္ခ္ဟာ သူပိုင္တဲ့လူမႈကြန္ယက္ေတြေပၚမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈကို ျမႇင့္တင္ေပးတယ္ လို႔ဆိုၿပီး ေဒၚလာ ဘီလ်ံ ၁၅၀ ေက်ာ္ေပးဖို႔ တရားစြဲေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Facebook Tried to Ban Myanmar’s Military. But Its Own Algorithm Kept Promoting Pages Supporting Them, Report Says

TIMES

BY BILLY PERRIGO
JUNE 24, 2021 

YANGON, MYANMAR - 2021/03/06: Myanmar military with military trucks seen during a demonstration against the military coup. Myanmar police attacked protesters with rubber bullets, live ammunition, tear gas and stun bombs in response to anti military coup protesters on Saturday. Myanmar's military detained State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi on February 01, 2021 and declared a state of emergency while seizing the power in the country for a year after losing the election against the National League for Democracy (NLD). (Photo by Santosh Krl/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett—© 2021 SOPA Images

Facebook promoted pages that shared pro-military propaganda in Myanmar, even after it banned accounts linked to the military from the platform due to human rights abuses and the risk of violence, according to a report by the human rights group Global Witness.

Myanmar’s armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, overthrew the country’s civilian government in February, claiming that elections in November 2020 had been rigged. Later that month, Facebook said it had decided to ban the Tatmadaw from its platform, citing the military’s history of human rights abuses, record of spreading misinformation and the increased risk of violence after the coup.

Facebook is still censoring groups fighting the military coup in Myanmar

rest of world
By KYAW HSAN HLAING
14 MAY 2021

Aung Kyaw Htet/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Nyo Twan Awng was an early adopter of Facebook in Myanmar. A doctor, he joined the social network in 2013, and said he used it to source medical information, as well as to share his poems and articles about art and literature. Alongside his artistic pursuits, he ran another channel: the Arakan Army Info Desk, a propaganda stream for the Arakan Army (AA), an armed group fighting for self-determination in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state.

Facebook Takes a Side, Barring Myanmar Military After Coup

The New York Times

By Paul Mozur, Mike Isaac, David E. Sanger and Richard C. Paddock
Published Feb. 24, 2021

Continue reading the main story

The move puts the social network squarely on the side of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement after years of criticism over how the military has used the site.

Soldiers set up barricades in Yangon, Myanmar, this month as tens of thousands gathered to protest the coup that ousted the civilian government.Credit... The New York Times

Facebook said on Wednesday that it had barred Myanmar’s military from its platforms, weeks after the country’s fragile democratic government was overthrown in a military coup.

The move, which also bars military-owned businesses from advertising on Facebook, plunged the social network more directly into Myanmar’s post-coup politics. The decision left little question that the company was taking the side of a pro-democracy movement against a military government that had abruptly seized power.

Facebook acted after years of criticism over how Myanmar’s military has used the site, including to incite hatred against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority group. Since the coup early this month, which ousted the civilian leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and returned Myanmar to full military rule, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites.

Facebook Takes a Side, Barring Myanmar Military After Coup

The New Your Times

By Paul Mozur, Mike Isaac, David E. Sanger and Richard C. Paddock
Feb. 24, 2021

The move puts the social network squarely on the side of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement after years of criticism over how the military has used the site.


Soldiers set up barricades in Yangon, Myanmar, this month as tens of thousands gathered to protest the coup that ousted the civilian government.Credit... The New York Times 

Facebook said on Wednesday that it had barred Myanmar’s military from its platforms, weeks after the country’s fragile democratic government was overthrown in a military coup.

The move, which also bars military-owned businesses from advertising on Facebook, plunged the social network more directly into Myanmar’s post-coup politics. The decision left little question that the company was taking the side of a pro-democracy movement against a military government that had abruptly seized power.