Facebooks's Role in the Pogroms and Genocide in Myanamar/Burma
The articles below call for their
break-up as happened with large trusts in America in the 19th
century. However socialists should talk
about how to democratically control social media not merely disperse them among
more capitalists.
Tony Greenstein
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Protesters hold placards and chant during a demonstration against Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as she attends an event at the Guildhall in the City of London on May 8, 2017.
CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES
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America responded to the Gilded
Age’s abuses of corporate power with antitrust laws that allowed the government
to break up the largest concentrations. It is time to use antitrust again. We
should break up the high-tech behemoths.
The Verge
The New York Times revealed last week that Facebook executives withheld
evidence of Russian activity on the Facebook platform far longer than
previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm
to discredit critics.
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A firefighter sprays a smouldering building in the wake of clashes between Buddhists and Muslims that left at least 20 people dead in a the central Myanmar town of Meikhtila in 2013.
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There’s a larger story here.
America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of
innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in
mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to
drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.
We’re now in a second Gilded Age — ushered in by semiconductors,
software and the internet — that has spawned a handful of giant high-tech
companies.
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Monks and protesters in Yangon, Myanmar, shout during a March 2015 march to denounce foreign criticism of the country's treatment of stateless Rohingya Muslims. AUBREY BELFORD/REUTERS
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Facebook and Google dominate advertising. They’re the first stops for
many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers.
Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to
buy anything.
This consolidation at the heart of the American economy creates two big
problems.
First, it stifles innovation. Contrary to the conventional view of a
U.S. economy bubbling with inventive small companies, the rate at which new
job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since
2004, according to the census.
A major culprit: Big tech’s sweeping patents, data, growing networks,
and dominant platforms have become formidable barriers to new entrants.
The second problem is political. These enormous concentrations of
economic power generate political clout that’s easily abused, as the New York
Times investigation of Facebook reveals. How long will it be before Facebook
uses its own data and platform against critics? Or before potential critics are
silenced even by the possibility?
America responded to the Gilded Age’s abuses of corporate power with
antitrust laws that allowed the government to break up the largest
concentrations.
President Teddy Roosevelt went after the Northern Securities Company, a
giant railroad trust financed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, the
nation’s two most powerful businessmen. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt
and ordered the company dismantled.
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Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testifies at a joint hearing of the Senate judiciary and commerce committees, April 2018. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.
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In 1911, President William Howard Taft broke up Rockefeller’s sprawling
Standard Oil empire.
It is time to use antitrust again. We should break up the high-tech
behemoths, or at least require that they make their proprietary technology and
data publicly available and share their platforms with smaller competitors.
There would be little cost to the economy, because these giant firms
rely on innovation rather than economies of scale — and, as noted, they’re
likely to be impeding innovation overall.
Is this politically feasible? Unlike the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans,
Trump and his enablers in Congress have shown little appetite for antitrust
enforcement.
But Democrats have shown no greater appetite — especially when it comes
to Big Tech.
In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of
competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s
dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing
Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to
consumers and to innovation.” But the commissioners, most of them Democratic
appointees, chose not to pursue the case.
The Democrats’ new “better deal” platform, which they unveiled a few
months before the midterm elections, included a proposal to attack corporate
monopolies in industries as wide-ranging as airlines, eyeglasses and beer. But,
notably, the proposal didn’t mention Big Tech.
Maybe the Democrats are reluctant to attack Big Tech because the
industry has directed so much political funding to Democrats. In the 2018
midterms, the largest recipient of Big Tech’s largesse, ActBlue, a fundraising
platform for progressive candidates, collected nearly $1 billion, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics.
As the Times investigation of Facebook makes clear, political power can’t
be separated from economic power. Both are prone to abuse.
One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent such abuses.
“The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate
combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical
conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice
of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, in 1873.
Antitrust law was viewed as a means of preventing giant corporations
from undermining democracy.
“If we will not endure a king as a political power,” thundered Ohio Sen.
John Sherman, the sponsor of the nation’s first antitrust law in 1890, “we
should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what
the nation produced.
We are now in a second Gilded Age, similar to the first when Congress
enacted Sherman’s law. As then, giant firms at the center of the American
economy are distorting the market and our politics.
We must resurrect antitrust.
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University
of California at Berkeley. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine
and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For
All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving
Capitalism," which is streaming now.
It’s
time to break up facebook
‘Start by breaking off WhatsApp
and Instagram’
By
Illustrations by William Joel
Tim Wu thinks it’s
time to break up Facebook.
Best known for coining the phrase
“net neutrality” and his book The
Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Wu has a new book coming out in November
called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
In it, he argues compellingly for a return to aggressive antitrust enforcement
in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, saying that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and
other huge tech companies are a threat to democracy as they get bigger and
bigger.
“We live in America, which has a
strong and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big for
inefficient reasons,” Wu told me on this week’s Vergecast.
“We need to reverse this idea that it’s not an American tradition. We’ve broken
up dozens of companies.”
And breaking up Facebook isn’t a new
idea. Ever since Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram and WhatsApp, the idea of
undoing those deals has been present at the periphery of the conversation about
regulating tech companies. Both were serious burgeoning competitors to the
social network, and both acquisitions sailed through without serious government
oversight, which was a mistake. Instead of facing competition, Facebook was
able to swallow its rivals and consolidate the market.
“I think if you took a hard look at
the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, the argument that the effects of
those acquisitions have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a
number of reasons,” says Wu. And breaking up the company wouldn’t be hard, he
says.
“What would be the harm? You’ll have
three competitors. It’s not ‘Oh my god, if you get rid of WhatsApp and
Instagram, well then the whole world’s going to fall apart.’ It would be like
‘Okay, now you have some companies actually trying to offer you an alternative
to Facebook.’”
“I THINK EVERYONE’S STEERING WAY
AWAY FROM THE MONOPOLIES, AND I THINK IT’S HURTING INNOVATION IN THE TECH
SECTOR.”
Breaking up Facebook (and other huge
tech companies like Google and Amazon) could be simple under the current law,
suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major rethinking of how antitrust law
should work in a world where the giant platform companies give their products
away for free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate power
seems to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think seriously
about the conditions that create innovation.
“I think everyone’s steering way away
from the monopolies, and I think it’s hurting innovation in the tech sector,”
says Wu.
Facebook
told us it wasn't a typical big, bad company. It is
The tech giant claimed to be
bringing the world together for the benefit of humanity. The truth is far less
palatable
Fri 16 Nov 2018 13.58 GMTLast
modified on Sat 17 Nov 2018 01.40 GMT
Facebook, like so many companies in
Silicon Valley, has always told us it was a different kind of company. Not so
much a business really, but a social utility. That it was linking the world for
the benefit of democracy, friendship and human connection.
It made grand statements about providing internet access to rural areasthrough special
solar-powered planes. (The project was scrapped earlier this year.)
It told the developing world it was giving them the internet for free viaFree Basics. (Users in India rose up in protest once they realised
they weren’t getting the internet but rather a walled garden of just Facebook
and some partner sites.) It let anyone, anywhere, use its platform to target
ads and news stories to people around the world. (We all know how that turned out, да?)
At some point Facebook’s marketing team even released a video trying
to convince us it was a comfortable chair that we could sit on. (I have no
explanation for this. It made no sense.)
But the events over the past year have made it abundantly clear
that Facebook is no different from several
other large corporations adept at feeding us one line while actually serving up
something a bit less palatable.
A New York Times investigation this week
expanded on Facebook’s many missteps when faced with Russian manipulation of
its platform, and exposed the company’s “dark arts” tactics to hurt their
critics and competitors. It detailed the company’s work with Definers Public
Affairs, a DC consultancy that planted articles across the web criticising
Google and Apple, as well as critics such as George Soros, the billionaire
philanthropist who has been vocal about Facebook and other tech companies.
For all its innovation, Facebook did not invent cover-ups or
smear campaigns. Documents from the 1980s show that Shell and Exxon were aware of and
predicted the negative impact of their products on the environment. Dupont knew that one of the
chemicals it used to make Teflon carried serious health risks – but
withheld that information from the public for decades.
Tobacco companies were found guilty in the US in 2006 of
having deceived the public about the health
impact of smoking. And politicians have long used “oppo research” to dig up
dirt on their opponents that they can then release during election time to stir
up public outrage.
Facebook and its thousands of progressive employees would surely
shudder to be included in the company of big oil, chemical manufacturers,
tobacco companies and politicians. And yet, are they really so different?
To be clear, Facebook is not all bad. It has helped us stay in
touch with family and friends. It lets us share videos of cute pandas while we
kill time in the doctor’s office. And it lets us voice our pent-up rage at
distant relatives whose political views are wildly different from our own.
But doing one or a few good things doesn’t mean you are a good
company or have good values. Because guess what? The large, shady corporations
that many of us distrust also do plenty of things that greatly simplify our
lives. Chemical companies produce plastics, which are ubiquitous thanks to
their functional versatility and low cost. Oil gets many of our cars from one
place to another.
Along with the practical value of these products comes the
marketing of the good of their parent companies. Remember the commercials from
Chevron that showed us fluffy, healthy animals, completely untarred,
accompanied by a calm voice telling us that the company cared deeply about the
environment? In a similar vein, Philip Morris has a global initiative to eliminate smoking, and
Dupont, the
manufacturer that once leaked toxic chemicals from one of its plants, now has a
philanthropic initiative that aims to “help feed the world”.
There is, however, one thing all these companies have in common
that Facebook does not. Tobacco, oil and chemical manufacturers have all faced
a reckoning in which fines and regulation have worked to keep them on a
straighter (if not straight) path.
If it wants to avoid a similar fate, Facebook would do well to
recognise what it is. It is not a social movement, not a tool for democracy,
and certainly not a chair. It is a company, and like most companies, driven
first and foremost by profit. The good companies are the ones who acknowledge
this but are equally aware of their responsibility and their need to act
ethically and with transparency. The bad companies are the ones who believe
they are something else – who tell themselves and the world that they are one
thing, when in fact they are something very different.
Jessica Powell
is the former vice-president of communications at Google and the author of The
Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional but Essentially True Silicon Valley Story,
available on Medium
HOW
FACEBOOK’S RISE FUELED CHAOS AND CONFUSION IN MYANMAR
The social
network exploded in Myanmar, allowing fake news and violence to consume a
country emerging from military rule.
THE RIOTS WOULDN’T have happened without Facebook.
On
the the evening of July 2, 2014 a swelling mob of hundreds of angry residents
gathered around the Sun Teashop filling the streets in the commercial hub of
Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. The teashop’s Muslim owner had been
accused, falsely, of raping a female Buddhist employee.
The
accusations against him, originally reported on a blog, exploded when they made
its way to Facebook—by then, synonymous with the internet in Myanmar. Many
among the crowd had seen the Facebook post, which was widely shared including
by a Mandalay-based ultra-nationalist monk named Wirathu, who has a massive following across the
country.
As
anger rose among the throngs of men, police struggled to disperse the growing
crowds, firing rubber bullets and trying to corral rioters into certain
sections of the city. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful. Soon, armed men
were marauding through the streets of the royal capital on motorbikes and by
foot wielding machetes and sticks. Rioters torched cars and ransacked shops.
A
curfew was imposed in the city and surrounding townships. Authorities were
fearful that the violence would spread to other towns that had seen outbreaks
of religious violence the previous year. The mayhem did not spread, but during
the multi-day melee in Mandalay two men—one Muslim and one Buddhist—were killed
and around 20 others were injured.
The
unrest was the latest in a string of flare-ups, often violent, between minority
Muslims and Buddhists in the majority-Buddhist country of around 51 million
since restrictions on free speech and the internet were steadily loosened
starting in 2010. Waves of violence broke out in the western Rakhine state in
2012 between Muslims and Buddhists, leaving nearly 200 dead and displaced some
140,000, mainly Rohingya Muslims and reverberated across the country in the
months and years that followed.
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| After the unrest, which left scores of buildings in flames, Myanmar’s army took control in the city. KHIN MAUNG WIN/AUSCHWITZ PROTOCOLS |
In Naypyitaw, the country’s vast capital some 170 miles
south of Mandalay, government officials quickly realized the seriousness of the
unfolding situation. Chris Tun, the head of Deloitte’s Myanmar operations and a
longtime member of the country’s tech community, received a frantic phone call.
On the line was Zaw Htay, a senior official in the office of President Thein
Sein, a retired general who until a few years earlier had served as the fourth
most powerful figure in the junta and a loyal comrade to dictator Than Shwe.
Thein Sein’s military-backed party suffered a
near-total defeat by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for
Democracy at the polls in November 2015. His term ended in March 2016. Aung San
Suu Kyi, who is barred by the constitution from holding the presidency, serves
as the country’s de facto leader with the title of State Counsellor. But the
military is not under civilian oversight and retains an outsized role in the
country’s political arena, controlling a quarter of all parliament seats as
well as three key ministries.
Desperate for a way to stem the mayhem, Zaw Htay asked
Tun—who worked previously in the United States and was involved in the US-ASEAN
Business council, a Washington-based lobbying group focused on Southeast
Asia—to try to contact Facebook on behalf of the President’s Office to see if
anything could be done to halt the spread of disinformation.
“They started to panic and they did not know what to do,”
says Tun, who left Deloitte last year. “He was quite worried.” Facebook does
not maintain an office in Myanmar, and there was, according to Tun, confusion
over how to reach officials at the company. Zaw Htay, who now serves at the
spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi's government, confirmed the phone call took
place.
Tun’s attempts to contact Facebook officials in the United
States dragged into the night but were unsuccessful. He eventually fell asleep.
Soon, a decision was made by the President’s Office to temporarily block access
to Facebook in Mandalay, Zaw Htay says.
The decision was the right one, he says, because it put a
stop to the clashes. When Tun awoke the next morning, he had five or six emails
from Facebook officials concerned over the site being unreachable, he says.
(Five people, including a woman who admitted she was paid to make the false
rape claim, were eventually sentenced to 21 years in prison for their roles in
starting the riots.)
ON JULY 20, 2014,
a little more than two weeks after the unrest, members of Myanmar’s budding
tech scene gathered in a conference room at MICT Park, a badly dated office
complex built in Yangon by the junta in a largely unsuccessful attempt to
advance the country’s tech prowess.
A panel discussion had been hastily arranged after the riots
with the help of Tun, Zaw Htay, and others. The participants included
representatives from Google, the Asia Foundation, and the government, but most
in the audience had come to hear—and demand answers—from Mia Garlick.
Garlick, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific
region, whose remit included Myanmar, told the audience that in response to the
violence the company planned to speed up translation of the sites’ user
guidelines and code of conduct into Burmese. Garlick also explained how content
was reviewed after it was flagged by users who found it to be offensive, though
it was unclear how many people fluent in Burmese language were doing this work.
The Burmese language community standards promised by
Garlick, however, would not launch until September 2015, 14 months after she
spoke in Yangon. And even now, nearly four years later, Facebook will not reveal
exactly how many Burmese speakers are evaluating content that has been flagged
as possibly violating its standards.
Facebook also had at least two direct warnings before the
2014 riots that hate speech was exploding on the platform and could have real-world
consequences.
Aela Callan, a foreign correspondent on a fellowship from
Stanford University, met with Elliot Schrage, vice president of global
communications for Facebook, in November 2013 to discuss hate speech and fake
user pages that were pervasive in Myanmar. Callan returned to the company’s
Menlo Park, California, headquarters in early March 2014, after follow-up
meetings, with an official from a Myanmar tech civil society organization to
again raise the issues with the company and show Facebook “how serious it [hate
speech and disinformation] was,” Callan says.
But Facebook’s sprawling bureaucracy and its excitement over
the potential of the the Myanmar market appeared to override concerns about the
proliferation of hate speech. At the time, the company had just one Burmese
speaker based in Dublin, Ireland, to review Burmese language content flagged as
problematic, Callan was told.
A spokeswoman for Facebook would say only that the content
review team has included Burmese language reviewers since 2013. “It was seen as
a connectivity opportunity rather than a big pressing problem,” Callan says. “I
think they were more excited about the connectivity opportunity because so many
people were using it, rather than the core issues.” Hate speech seemed like a
“low priority” for Facebook at the time, she says.
Myanmar was a small but unique market for the company, and
Facebook has taken a multi-faceted approach in recent years to better serve
users, Garlick says. This includes hiring additional Burmese speakers to review
content, improving reporting tools, and “developing local and relevant content”
to educate users on how to best use the platform. “We have been working over
the years to sort of increase our resourcing and the work that we can do to try
to reduce misuse and abuse of our platform and to try to drive the benefit that
connectivity can have within the country,” she says.
To critics of the social media company, the early response
to the Mandalay riots were harbingers of the difficulties it would face in
Myanmar in the coming years—difficulties that persist to this day: A slow
response time to posts violating Facebook’s standards, a barebones staff
without the capacity to handle hate speech or understand Myanmar’s cultural
nuances, an over-reliance on a small collection of local civil society groups
to alert the company to possibly dangerous posts spreading on the platform. All
of these reflect a decidedly ad-hoc approach for a multi-billion-dollar tech
giant that controls so much of popular discourse in the country and across the
world.
Today, four years since the riots, Facebook’s role in
society is again under intense scrutiny, both in Myanmar and around the world.
Myanmar’s military has been accused of rape, arson, and arbitrary killing of
Rohingya Muslims during a campaign launched last year after militant attacks on
police posts. The UN lambasted Facebook’s conduct in the crisis, which the
global body says "bears the hallmarks of genocide,” by serving as a
platform for hate speech and disinformation, saying Facebook had "turned
into a beast.”
At the same time, Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg
are under global pressure for mishandling users’ data and the part the company
played in influencing elections, particularly in the the United States. In
April, Zuckerberg testified before Congress over two days on a myriad of
problems within his company, from Russian agents using the platform to
influence the US elections to a lack of data protections.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April. He told Congress in written testimony that he is "responsible for" not preventing the social media platform from being used for harm, including fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech.
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Myanmar came up in the hearings too. Why, the legislators
wanted to know, hadn’t the company responded sooner to issues raised there.
Zuckerberg said Facebook had a three-pronged approach to
address issues in Myanmar— “dramatically” ramp up its local language content
reviewers, take down accounts of individuals and groups that generate hate
speech, and introduce products specially designed for the country, though he
offered few details on what these would entail.
Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook needed to improve came
too late for some critics who said he failed to adequately take responsibility
for what has been a long-term issue. (UPDATE, July 19, 2018: Facebook announced on July 18 that it would expand its
efforts to remove material that could incite violence.)
"From at least that Mandalay incident, Facebook knew.
There were a few things done in late 2014 and 2015 and there was some effort
made to try to understand the issues, but it wasn’t a fraction of what was
needed,” says David Madden, a gregarious Australian who in 2014 founded Phandeeyar, a
tech-hub in Yangon, the country’s largest city, that helped Facebook launch its
Burmese language community standards. “That’s not 20/20 hindsight. The scale of
this problem was significant and it was already apparent."
FACEBOOK’S RISE IN popularity in Myanmar came at a time of tremendous political
and societal change in the Southeast Asian nation which fueled and enabled the
platform’s growth. Myanmar had been ruled since 1962 by successive military
regimes that drove the country into political isolation, crippled the economy, oppressed ethnic minorities, and repeatedly put down popular uprisings with deadly force.
A parliamentary election in 2010 was widely criticized as far from
free and fair but an important step for the military’s carefully choreographed
transition to quasi-civilian rule. Aung San Suu Kyi, the wildly popular
opposition leader held by the military under house arrest for some 15 years,
was barred from participating. Members of her party, the National League for
Democracy, boycotted the vote, in which the majority of seats were won by a
military backed party. Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest six days after ballots were cast.
Thein Sein was sworn in as president of Myanmar in March
2011 for a five-year term. The bespectacled, subdued leader surprised observers
by embracing a number of reforms—quickly suspending an unpopular
Chinese-backed dam project and, in 2012, dropping
heavy-handed censorship of the press. That year, the country
was enraptured by a visit from President Barack Obama, the first sitting US President to visit
Myanmar. It was a remarkable turn of events given that seven years earlier, the
US had labelled the country an “outpost of tyranny,” along with North Korea and Iran,
and for years had punished it with harsh economic sanctions. (The last of the
sanctions were lifted by the fall of 2016, though one former general has been
since been sanctioned for his alleged role in the violence
against the Rohingya.)
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Barack Obama and Myanmar's President Thein Sein shake hands before the East Asia Summit in Myanmar’s capitol, Naypyitaw, in November 2014. SOE ZEYA TUN/REUTERS
This slowly began to change, and in 2012, mostly in major
cities like Yangon and Mandalay, SIM card prices fell to hundreds of dollars
from over a thousand, making them slightly more accessible though still out of
reach to most. As internet connectivity expanded, so did social media. The
state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper declared in 2013 that in Myanmar, “a person
without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address.”
Sonny Swe, the founder of the independent Myanmar
Times newspaper
who was jailed by the junta, says he was hit by a “digital tsunami” when he was
released from prison during an amnesty in April 2013.
He served more than eight years of his 14-year sentence,
passing the time by speaking to spiders and other insects that crawled through
his cell. “I named them individually and they all become my friends,” he would
say later.
Upon his release, he noticed two things—the heavier traffic
choking the streets of Yangon and the widespread usage of mobile phones. His
son helped him set up a Facebook page days after he was freed in the back of
the newspaper’s aging offices.
The digital transformation was poised to accelerate that
year, when the government granted licenses to two foreign telecoms
providers—Norway’s Telenor and and Qatar’s Ooredoo—ending the state monopoly.
Ambitious connectivity targets included in the license
agreements by the government ensured that the country’s internet use would
skyrocket in coming years. When Telenor and Ooredoo launched operations in
2014, people queued for hours for SIM cards that cost around a dollar. Mobile
shops appeared seemingly overnight hawking cheap Chinese smartphones. The
state-run telecom provider, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications, partnered with
two Japanese firms the same year, further increasing
competition and connectivity.
Mobile penetration leapt to 56 percent by 2015, according to
a Deloitte report, with many Burmese accessing the internet for
the first time on phones. Today, according to the UN’s International
Telecommunication Union, citing official figures, internet access is around 25
percent and mobile penetration around 90 percent. In a recent briefing in
Washington, DC, one longtime Myanmar expert described the adoption of Facebook
that followed this sudden uptick in connectivity as the fastest in the world.
Predictably, this has all had a huge impact on the
distribution of information. Last year, a public opinion survey from the International Republican Institute
found that 38 percent of people polled got most, if not all, their news from
Facebook. Respondents said that they were most likely to get their news from
Facebook rather than newspapers, though radio, relatives and friends, and TV were
more popular. There are now an estimated 18 million people who use Facebook in
Myanmar, according to the company.
While the positive developments in Myanmar under Thein Sein
were noteworthy, tremendous challenges remained. Conflicts between the
still-powerful military and a number of ethnic armed groups, some of whom had
been battling for greater autonomy for decades, continued or intensified. Land
confiscation and human rights violations remained pervasive. Bouts of violence
in 2012 between Buddhists and the Rohingya on the country’s west coast added a
new obstacle to the country’s precarious path toward a fuller democracy. Tens
of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised as they languished in ramshackle
camps.
During the decades of military rule, the country lacked a
free press and the junta operated largely in secret—the military changed the
country’s flag and moved the capital with almost no prior
warnings—people in Myanmar had spent decades reliant on state-run propaganda
newspapers, parsing opaque military announcements for what was really
happening. The arrival of Facebook provided a country with severely limited
digital literacy a hyper-connected version of the country’s ubiquitous tea shops where people gathered to swap stories,
news and gossip.
“Myanmar is a country run by rumors, where people fill in
the blanks,” says Derek Mitchell, who served as US Ambassador to Myanmar from
2012 to 2016.
There is a great insecurity and fear among people in Myanmar
that unseen powers are working in the shadows to control the levers of power,
Mitchell says. The arrival of Facebook provided a platform for these rumors to
spread at an alarming rate. “Facebook could have done more to proactively talk
about positive speech,” he says, “how to look at things on Facebook to avoid
pitfalls, and the dangers of negative speech, put their brand behind a more
constructive approach to the platform.”
As hate speech and dubious articles quickly began to surface
in volume on Facebook in 2012 and 2013, many targeting Muslims and the
Rohingya in particular, the government raised concerns that the site could be
used to incite unrest. Some activists and rights groups, however, were not totally
convinced of the threat of online hate speech.
In 2013 an official from Human Rights Watch was
largely dismissive that Facebook could play a major role
in the spread of hate speech. He pointed to pamphlets distributed by monks and
ultra-nationalist organizations in rural areas prior to the 2012 violence in
Rakhine as a more pernicious vehicle for spreading disinformation.
This skepticism about the risks of Facebook was rooted in
part in a fear that the government or military would use hate speech as an
excuse to censor or block certain websites that it did not agree with. The fear
of web suppression was not unfounded. Myanmar had in the past restricted access
to the internet, notably during the 2007 monk-led popular uprising dubbed the “Saffron Revolution,” in an failed attempt to keep news
of the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown from leaking out.
“The answer to bad speech, is more speech. More
communication, more voices,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said in
Yangon in March 2013. The Myanmar public was, “in for the ride of your life
right now,” he added in the speech that was a gleeful take on the positives
Myanmar would reap from its technological and telecoms liberation.
IN EARLY 2015, in collaboration with local tech civil society groups,
Facebook made a set of digital stickers available on the messenger platform.
The stickers were part of the broader “Panzagar” campaign, “flower speech” in English,
launched by activists, including former political prisoners, to counter hate
speech and promote online inclusion. While the project gained considerable
media attention, some critics said it still failed to address the underlying
issues on Facebook. “People gave [Facebook] a lot of credit for that, but it
seemed to be the smallest gesture to be made,” says a former US tech company
official who worked extensively in Myanmar. “People died, but now you can use
this digital sticker.”
That year, a collection of civil society groups also began
working with Facebook to flag dangerous posts and misinformation on the
platform, hoping to speed up the removal time for content that could fuel
violence, according to three people involved in the effort who asked not to be
named because of the sensitive nature of the work.
This emergency escalation system, which still operates in
largely the same manner, relies on a small group of individuals finding
potentially dangerous posts, contacting Facebook officials, often times
Garlick, who then expedite the referral of the content to a moderation team for
review and potential removal.
Garlick declined to comment on the group’s work citing
security concerns.
But the process lacks scalability and is not efficient,
those involved say. In one case in late November 2017, it took three days from
initial flagging of a post threatening a prominent journalist to its removal,
by which time it had been copied and shared numerous times. The journalist,
fearing for their safety, left the country that month and has not returned.
“Facebook wasn’t staffed to deal with a crisis and it sounds like they still
aren’t,” the former US tech official says. “All internet companies are like
this to some degree, but especially Facebook because it is so leanly staffed on
the government relations side. They are engineering companies and they don’t
like spending money where there is not a clear [return on investment].”
Madden, the tech hub founder, flew to California in May 2015
to speak to Facebook executives about Myanmar’s massive growth in online users
and the rise of Buddhist nationalism, he also delivered a stark message to
Facebook. In a lengthy presentation to company officials, he said Facebook
risked being a platform used to foment widespread violence, akin to the way
radio broadcasts were used to incite killings during the Rwandan genocide.
“A small collection of civil society groups is not going to
solve this problem,” says Madden, who now serves as Phandeeyar’s president.
“This is where the culpability comes in, this was made clear at numerous points
along the way. The volume of hate speech required serious product changes. This
was clear well before 2017.”
It was not just domestic groups who were raising concerns.
C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that has worked with firms like data
company Palantir, released an exhaustive report detailing hate speech trends and its
facilitators in February 2016. By analyzing the Facebook accounts of 100 monks,
politicians, activists, government officials, and laypeople, the group found
what it described as a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes
Muslims.”
In addition to posts, researchers found that “crude and
dehumanizing anti-Muslim imagery and language is regularly woven into ‘memes’”
including widely shared ones portraying bestiality aimed at Muslims and the
“Prophet Muhammed being orally penetrated.”
Still Facebook pressed on with Myanmar expansion, launching
in June 2016 its Free Basics program with Myanma Post and
Telecommunications, despite huge issues with the program in neighboring India. The service, which was never adopted by Telenor
or Oooredoo, was quietly shuttered in Myanmar due to government regulation
changes the following year.
Madden says he met again with Facebook officials in January
2017 as did two other people familiar with the gathering, which took place in
Menlo Park. The meeting was born in large part out of continued disappointment
with the company’s inability to quickly address hate speech. There was also
mounting frustration over Facebook’s stubborn resistance to sharing information
with the civil society groups they relied so heavily on, like the number of
people working on Burmese language content monitoring. “We were very
prescriptive,” says Madden, who described one slide in the presentation as simply
a picture of a large question mark meant to highlight Facebook’s lack of
transparency.
Garlick acknowledges that the company has been “too slow,”
to respond to issues raised by civil society groups. “There is more we need to
do and we will continue to work with civil society groups in Myanmar to listen,
learn, and make progress,” she says.
Still, the company continued its work with seemingly little
local input. One of its most public stumbles came four months after the meeting
in May, when it began to remove posts and suspend users for posts including the
term “kalar,” a Burmese word often used as a slur for people of South Asian
origin. The word, however, is also used in other non-offensive phrases like
“kalar pae,” lentil beans, or “kala-awe thee” a type of particularly spicy
chili.
While well intentioned, the process showed a profound lack
of familiarity with the Burmese language and the context of language use. It
also angered members of the tech community helping flag dangerous content,
because they were blamed by upset users for the policy, though they were not
involved with the initiative and were unaware that it would start.
“We’ve had trouble enforcing this policy correctly recently,
mainly due to the challenges of understanding the context; after further
examination, we’ve been able to get it right. But we expect this to be a
long-term challenge,” Richard Allen, a Facebook vice president of public policy
wrote in a post on the company’s website.
A person with knowledge of Facebook’s Myanmar operations was
decidedly more direct than Allen, calling the roll out of the initiative
“pretty fucking stupid.”
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| LYDIA ORTIZ/PATRICK RAFANAN |
MISLEADING FACEBOOK POSTS continue to trigger confusion, threats of violence, and
government overreach in Myanmar. Consider the case of journalist and translator
Aung Naing Soe, who in November 2016 was targeted online after users began
circulating a picture they claimed showed him standing with members of the
Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. The militant group attacked police posts in
October 2016 and again in August 2017, sparking the massive campaign against
the Rohingya that has driven hundreds of thousands to neighboring Bangladesh.
(Disclosure: Aung Naing Soe was my translator for an article I wrote, which was published by the
NewYorker.com in April.)
Aung Naing Soe was not in the photo, and it took several
attempts and flags for Facebook to finally remove the post. Copies of it still
circulate on the platform. Other posts targeted his religion and work as a
journalist. Vermont’s Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy raised the case during
Zuckerberg’s testimony in April: One post aimed at Aung Naing
Soe, he said, “calls for the death of a Muslim journalist. Now, that threat
went straight through your detection systems, it spread very quickly, and then
it took attempt after attempt after attempt, and the involvement of civil
society groups, to get you to remove it. Why couldn't it be removed within 24
hours?”
Zuckerberg responded that what was happening in Myanmar was
a “terrible tragedy, and we need to do more,” before Leahy tersely interjected,
“We all agree with that.” Zuckerberg then laid out his three fixes for the
company’s Myanmar operations.
In an interview, Aung Naing Soe says he was approached by a
member of Special Branch, a notorious intelligence unit of the Myanmar Police
Force, who questioned him about the false accusation of being a member of ARSA,
which, in the time it was on Facebook, was widely shared including by a former
member of parliament. For the next two months, whenever he travelled outside of
Yangon, he had to inform the officer where he was going, he says.
Not that the increased government scrutiny deterred Aung
Naing Soe from pursuing his work as a journalist. He was arrested in late
October 2017 along with two foreign journalists working for Turkey’s state
broadcaster for flying a drone near parliament on a reporting trip. The group
pleaded guilty and were held for two months in jail before the case was
dropped. Aung Naing Soe says that while the other journalists were only
questioned for a few days, he was interrogated for 11 or 12 days because of the
Facebook posts.
If the intentions of the police were to deter Aung Naing Soe
from reporting, they didn’t work. He quickly returned to covering protests and
jailings of other journalists while doling out cigarettes to fellow reporters
in the informal Yangon press corps. He has become an outspoken advocate for
media freedom, even joking about his stint in jail. “The good part of being
arrested is this problem is officially solved,” he says with a laugh. “Police
have an official record that I’m not part of the group.”
Civil society groups and researchers say that Aung Naing Soe’s
experience—particularly the vehemence of attacks against him on Facebook—was
not unique. Raymond Serrato, a digital researcher and analyst who has tracked
hate speech and bots related to Myanmar, found a huge uptick in hate speech on
Facebook as the Rohingya crisis unfolded last October. Anti-Rohingya groups saw
a 200 percent increase in activity. Many of the posts, he says, compared
Muslims to dogs or other animals. “There was a lot of dehumanization,” he says.
“A lot of mutilated bodies.”
If Facebook did not see the pages, it is because they
“didn’t know where to look,” he says. “It is clear they don’t know about the
ethnic and social politics in the countries” that they operate in.
Meanwhile, the Myanmar government and military have been
among the most adept and sophisticated users of Facebook, using the platform to
put out their own narrative of the Rohingya crisis. The office of the
Commander-in-Chief in March posted photos of dismembered children and dead
babies, claiming they were attacked by Rohingya terrorists, to counter British
MPs, who were sharply critical of the country’s handling of the Rohingya
crisis.
Zaw Htay, the government spokesman, has used the platform on numerous occasions
to share debunked photos purporting to show Rohingya burning their own homes
and derided claims of sexual violence by soldiers as “fake rape.” In the past,
he often used a Facebook page with the pseudonym “Hmuu Zaw.”
A former senior government official said Zaw Htay was the
“focal person,” of Facebook’s dealings with the country’s government. The
relationship that Facebook has with the Zaw Htay, a retired Army officer, was
described as “problematic,” according to the person with knowledge of the
company’s work in Myanmar.
Zaw Htay did not respond to requests for comment about his
controversial posts. Facebook’s policy toward prohibited content applies to all
users, including government officials, Garlick says.
THE CONTINUED FRUSTRATIONS faced by civil society groups, tech organizations, and those
at the receiving end of harassment on Facebook burst into public view this
spring in the wake of an incident involving the detection and removal of yet
more disinformation.
During an interview with the website Vox in early April,
Zuckerberg claimed the the company had found chain letters that were widely
shared across the country on Facebook messenger starting in early September.
One message warned Buddhist groups about an imminent attack by Muslims on
September 11. The the other warned of violence from Buddhist nationalists
toward Muslims on the same date.
In Zuckerberg’s retelling of events, he got a call on a
Saturday morning that there were messages stoking violence spreading through
Facebook Messenger. “Now, in that case, our systems detect that that’s going
on. We stop those messages from going through,” he said.
Civil society groups were caught off guard and angered by
Zuckerberg’s characterization that Facebook’s systems had detected the
messages, which differed greatly from theirs.
In reality, they say, it was their members who had found the
messages, alerted Facebook, and waited days for a response. The messages, the
groups say, lead to at least three violent incidents, including the attempted
torching of an Islamic school and the ransacking of shops and houses belonging
to Muslims in a town in central Myanmar.
A group of six civil society organizations said in a
scathing open letter to Zuckerberg that the messenger incident
showed an “over-reliance on third parties, a lack of a proper mechanism for
emergency escalation, a reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic
solutions, and a lack of transparency.”
Zuckerberg later apologized by email for “not being
sufficiently clear” about the role that civil society groups play in monitoring
content, according to a copy of the email published by the New York Times. He added the company has hired “dozens more
Burmese language reviewers,” a refrain that has become so common it is now a
running joke in Myanmar tech circles.
The company, however, has failed to provide details about
these monitors. Garlick declined to provide a specific number of Burmese
language content reviewers, saying only that the number had increased over the
years and that the company employs “dozens of reviewers now, and we are aiming
to double that by the year’s end.”
The company will say that is has more than 7,500 content
reviewers working in over 50 languages. Asked if the company had reviewers
proficient in the other languages besides Burmese that are used widely in
Myanmar, a spokeswoman said only that when content is reported that is not in
one of the languages covered by the company, Facebook works with people
familiar with the language to determine if the content violates standards. A
list of languages that the content reviewers do work in was not available, the
spokeswoman said.
In recent months, Facebook has taken some important steps
and has acknowledged that the company can do more. In February, the company
banned Wirathu, the radical monk who helped instigate the Mandalay riots.
Following the pushback from civil society groups, it has taken down pages of
other nationalist organizations and monks, removing major sources of hate
speech and misinformation. Facebook recently posted ads for Myanmar-focused
jobs, including a public policy manager, specifying that fluency in Burmese and
an understanding “of the Myanmar political system” were essential skills for
the Singapore-based job.
It has also rolled out tools to report content on Facebook
Messenger and is exploring the possibility of using AI to identify hateful
content faster, a spokeswoman says. Business for Social Responsibility, a
California based nonprofit organization, will soon begin a human rights impact
assessment of Facebook’s role in Myanmar that will be made public when it is
completed.
Still the secrecy around Facebook’s operations persists. In
written responses to follow-up questions from Senator Leahy, the company stuck to
the familiar, evasive line. When asked specifically about the number of Burmese
language speakers monitoring content the company said only that it “added
dozens more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from users across our
services, and we plan to more than double the number of content reviewers
focused on user reports.”
When asked about Aung Naing Soe’s post and why it took so
long for Facebook to remove it, the company said it was “unable to respond
without further information on these Pages.”
While the print-outs of the posts used by Senator Leahy were
blurred to protect his identity the fact that it was Aung Naing Soe was hardly
a secret. He has spoken openly to the media about his experience and was identified widely on social
media. He said that no representative from the company had been in touch with
him regarding the incident.
Last month, a large delegation of Facebook officials made a
high-profile trip to Myanmar. Lead by Simon Milner, Vice President of Public
Policy for Asia-Pacific, the group met with the Ministry of Information, which suggested the company
open an office in Myanmar, according to a state-media report on the meeting. A
spokeswoman for Facebook said the company currently has no plans to open an
office in the country and is capable of working around the clock by having
teams working on Myanmar located in different time zones.
The trip, which also included meetings with civil society
groups, was meant to express the company’s “deep commitment to keeping the
millions of people who use Facebook in Myanmar safe on our services,” Garlick
says.
But among Myanmar observers and experts, there are already
concerns about the role Facebook could play in the country’s 2020 elections.
The population will be more connected than it was five years prior. The wars
that have riled the country for decades show no signs of abating, and vitriol
against the Rohingya continues even as the country makes preparations for their
return. There is deep skepticism that the current attention will push Facebook
to meaningfully address the problems in Myanmar.
"When the media spotlight
has been on there has been talk of changes, but after it passes are we actually
going to see significant action?”
Madden asks. “That is an open question.
The historical record is not encouraging."
UPDATE: This
article has been revised to include Facebook's announcement that it will expand
its efforts to remove material that could incite violence.
Twitter
Relents
My thanks to the hundreds of Twitter supporters who tweeted in
protest of the company blocking my account for the past five days. My
special thanks to Ali Abunimah, who contacted the Twitter’s media team
inquiring about my situation. This morning the company restored my account and
I’m back in business. Ali sprang me from Twitter jail! This proves what
I’ve claimed all along: that decisions like suspensions are mostly based on
automated settings. If a certain number of users flag your account it
will be suspended no matter what content you published. In other words,
it has little or nothing to do with the actual content. I’ll bet if 1,000
users reported a Twitter account for a picture of a ham sandwich it would be
suspended.
Once suspended the only means to remove the suspension (short of
enduring the entire “sentence”) is if you are a celebrity or well-known public
figure who can muster a viral campaign; or if the media gets interested.
Once that happens Twitter will take the course of least resistance and relent,
unless there is a significant down-side in doing so (i.e. Alex Jones, for example).
 |
| Death threat sent as a message to this website |
I’m very grateful to Ali for his solidarity in this matter.
Now back to raising hell and showing these pro-Israel goons to
be what they are. Funny, some people are touchy about such
language. At the r/Israel_Palestine subreddit, one of the pro-Israel mods
deleted my post about this experience because the word “goon” was deemed
‘uncivil.’ Funny how calling settlers who kill Palestinians (or justify their
killing) by their proper name is not permitted in “polite society,” while
criticism of the acts themselves is censored.
But how else would you describe this?
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