[In Myanmar, Facebook is so dominant that to many people it is the internet itself. And the stakes of what appears on the site are exceptionally high because misinformation, as well as explicitly hostile language, is widening longstanding ethnic divides and stoking the violence against the Rohingya ethnic group.]
By Megan Specia and Paul Mozur
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Ashin
Wirathu in 2013. He has been barred from public preaching in Myanmar
since
March. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
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Myanmar’s government has barred Ashin
Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk, from public preaching for the past
year, saying his speeches helped fuel the violence against the country’s Rohingya
ethnic group that the United Nations calls ethnic cleansing.
So he has turned to an even more powerful and
ubiquitous platform to get his message out — Facebook.
Every day he posts updates, often containing
false information, that spread a narrative of the Rohingya as aggressive
outsiders. And posts like these have put Facebook at the center of a fierce
information war that is contributing to the crisis involving the minority
group. International human rights groups say Facebook should be doing more to
prevent the hateful speech, focusing as much on global human rights as on its
business.
“Facebook is quick on taking down swastikas,
but then they don’t get to Wirathu’s hate speech where he’s saying Muslims are
dogs,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia
division.
Across the world, Facebook and other social
platforms are being questioned about their expanding role and responsibilities
as publishers of information. In Britain, investigations have begun into the
spread of misinformation on social media about the European Union membership
referendum. In the United States, lawmakers are looking into Russian efforts to
influence the 2016 presidential election on social media platforms.
In Myanmar, Facebook is so dominant that to
many people it is the internet itself. And the stakes of what appears on the
site are exceptionally high because misinformation, as well as explicitly
hostile language, is widening longstanding ethnic divides and stoking the
violence against the Rohingya ethnic group.
For example, since the government crackdown
against the Rohingya began, Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the country’s de facto
leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has shared dozens of posts on his Facebook page
and Twitter account that include images said to show Rohingya burning their own
homes. Many of these images have been debunked, yet they still stand.
First-person accounts from Rakhine State
establish a coordinated crackdown against the Rohingya minority by the military
and by ultranationalist groups, driving more than 600,000 refugees across the
border into Bangladesh.
Facebook does not police the billions of
posts and status updates that flow through the site worldwide each day, relying
instead on an oftentimes confusing set of “community standards” and reports by
users of direct threats that are then manually assessed and, in some cases,
removed.
After the 2016 United States elections,
Facebook rolled out a set of guidelines to help users identify fake news and
misinformation. The company does not regularly remove misinformation itself.
Facebook has no office in Myanmar, but the
company has worked with local partners to introduce a Burmese-language
illustrated copy of its platform standards and will “continue to refine” its
practices, said a spokeswoman, Clare Wareing, in an emailed statement.
Human rights groups say the company’s
approach has allowed opinion, facts and misinformation to mingle on Facebook,
clouding perceptions of truth and propaganda in a country where mobile
technology has been widely adopted only in the past three years.
Under the rule of the military junta, strict
censorship regulations deliberately made SIM cards for cellphones unaffordable
to control the free flow of information. In 2014, restrictions loosened and the
use of mobile technology exploded as SIM cards became affordable. Facebook
users ballooned from about two million in 2014 to more than 30 million today.
But most users do not know how to navigate the wider internet.
“Facebook has become sort of the de facto
internet for Myanmar,” said Jes Kaliebe Petersen, chief executive of
Phandeeyar, Myanmar’s leading technology hub that helped Facebook create its
Burmese-language community standards page. “When people buy their first
smartphone, it just comes preinstalled.”
Mr. Petersen said local media and news
outlets should help combat misinformation in a technology sector still in its
infancy.
“There are still some challenges here, and
there are of course very big differences between big cities and rural
communities,” he said. “I think it’s really important that people focus on
educating this new generation of digital users.”
In the meantime, Facebook has become a
breeding ground for hate speech and virulent posts about the Rohingya. And
because of Facebook’s design, posts that are shared and liked more frequently
get more prominent placement in feeds, favoring highly partisan content in timelines.
Ashin Wirathu, the monk, has hundreds of
thousands of followers on Facebook accounts in Burmese and English. His posts
include graphic photos and videos of decaying bodies that Ashin Wirathu says
are Buddhist victims of Rohingya attacks, or posts denouncing the minority
ethnic group or updates that identify them falsely as “Bengali” foreigners.
Facebook has removed some of his posts and
restricted his page for stretches, but it is currently active. In an interview,
Ashin Wirathu said that if Facebook did remove his account, he would simply
create a new one. He added that if anyone did not like his Facebook posts,
“they can sue me.”
Posts from verified government and military
Facebook accounts also carry misinformation. Some, for example, refuse to
acknowledge the Rohingya as an ethnic group deserving of citizenship rights,
despite the fact many have lived in Rakhine State for generations.
Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief
of Myanmar’s armed forces who has carried out the crackdown on the Rohingya,
has more than 1.3 million users on his verified account. A post from Sept. 15
describes the operation as a response to an “attempt of extremist Bengalis in
Rakhine State to build a stronghold,” after an Aug. 25 attack on remote border
posts by a Rohingya militant group.
Rohingya activists also use Facebook,
documenting human rights abuses, often with graphic images and videos as
evidence. Sometimes the company has taken these down.
Ms. Wareing, the Facebook spokeswoman, said
the company removed graphic content “when it is shared to celebrate the
violence.” She said the company would allow graphic content if it was
newsworthy, significant or important to the public interest, even if it might
otherwise go against the platform’s standards.
Richard Weir, an Asia analyst with Human
Rights Watch, said the situation was complicated.
“It’s a really delicate balance here between
things that are violent and posted by people who would seek to inflame tensions
and those that are trying to disseminate information,” Mr. Weir said. “It’s
difficult to know where exactly to draw the line.”
Some of the social media conversation is
happening privately. For instance, chain messages on Facebook Messenger before
Sept. 11 this year falsely warned of a planned Rohingya attack against
Buddhists. Written like a chain letter, the message called for people to share
it, and many people were put on edge as it spread.
“I was nervous about it,” said U Tin Win, a
teacher from Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, who received the
letter. “I don’t know who started the message, but I ordered my family not to
go outside that day.”
Mr. Weir said that people in Myanmar relied
on social media for their news.
“The government can sort of trot out its own
views and spread them very rapidly, in addition to a bunch of other nonstate
entities,” he said. “Views about people in Rakhine State, about the origins of
population and about things that may or may not have happened fly around
Facebook extremely quickly and can create unstable situations.”
Megan Specia reported from New York, and Paul
Mozur from Shanghai. Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco, and
Saw Nang from Mandalay, Myanmar.
