Meta’s new content policies risk fueling more mass violence and genocide

AMNESTY
International
17 February 2025 

By Pat de Brún, Head of Big Tech Accountability at Amnesty International and Maung Sawyeddollah, the founder and Executive Director of the Rohingya Students’ Network.

Recent content policy announcements by Meta pose a grave threat to vulnerable communities globally and drastically increase the risk that the company will yet again contribute to mass violence and gross human rights abuses – just like it did in Myanmar in 2017. The company’s significant contribution to the atrocities suffered by the Rohingya people is the subject of a new whistleblower complaint that has just been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar. Now It Is Rejecting a Request to Help With a Genocide Investigation

TIME

By Matthew Smith
August 18, 2020

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, listens during a meeting at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. on Sept. 27, 2015.
David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

 

Just when it seemed like Facebook’s controversies might have peaked, the company now appears to be obstructing a genocide investigation, and it’s using U.S. law to do it.

The West African nation The Gambia is seeking to hold Myanmar accountable for charges of genocide against the Rohingya people, an ethnic and religious minority. In 2016 and 2017, Myanmar soldiers and their civilian proxies massacred Rohingya men, women and children, raped women and girls and razed villages, forcing more than 800,000 to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.

Facebook Doesn’t Understand How Dangerous Its Megaphone Is

The Washinton Post
By Shira Ovide | Bloomberg
Oct. 18, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday gave a passionate defense of how Facebook Inc. and the rest of the internet are essential tools for the free expression that is essential in a healthy democracy. I agree with this in principle, as I imagine most Americans would.

The dark side of Facebook and the mass-market internet is not necessarily the ideas behind them. It is how those principles can wittingly or unwittingly be subverted when principle meets reality. The question is whether the good that comes from anything — Facebook, the automobile, electricity — outweighs the inevitable negative effects and whether it’s possible to mitigate the latter while accentuating the former.

တုိင္းရင္းလက္နက္ကိုင္ ၄ ဖဲြ႔အေကာင့္ေတြပိတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ FaceBook ကုိ ကန္၀ါရင့္အမတ္ ရွင္းလင္းခ်က္ ေတာင္းခံ

VOA

ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)

အင္ၾကင္းႏိုင္ ၊06 မတ္၊ 2019

 အေမရိကန္အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးရာေကာ္မတီ၀င္ ၀ါရင့္ ဒီမိုကရက္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ Edward Markey

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ တိုင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္ေလးဖဲြ႔ရဲ႕ Facebook အေကာင့္ေတြကို ပိတ္လိုက္ျခင္းအားျဖင့္ အစိုးရဘက္က ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေစ့စပ္ညွဳိႏႈိင္းေနသူေတြ၊ အရပ္ဖက္အဖဲြ႕အစည္းေတြ၊ အေမရိကန္နဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံတ ကာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ေတြအပါအ၀င္ ျပင္ပကမၻာနဲ႔ ေစ့စပ္မႈလမ္းေၾကာင္းကို ျဖတ္ေတာက္လိုက္ တာျဖစ္ တယ္လုိ႕ အေမရိကန္ ၀ါရင့္အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္တဦးက Facebook ကုမၸဏီကို ျပင္းျပင္း ထန္ထန္ေ၀ ဖန္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

( 26.03.2018 ) Is Facebook contributing to genocide in Myanmar? ( Asia Times )

Social media giant under scrutiny for spreading hate speech that has fueled persecution of nation's Rohingya Muslim minority 

By Lee Short Yangon, March 26, 2018

 

A Rohingya man looking at Facebook onn his cell phone at a temporary makeshift camp after crossing over from Myanmar into the Bangladesh side of the border, near Cox's Bazar's Palangkhali, September 8, 2017. Photo: Nurphoto via AFP/ Ahmed Salahuddin.

It’s not every day that a country of over 51 million people goes online virtually overnight.

But that’s been the case in Myanmar, which until recently had one of the world’s lowest internet penetration rates but is now largely plugged into the digital age. And as many will attest, Facebook is the internet in Myanmar.