[There are plenty of real-world examples already. The obvious one is Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of just under 53 million people and a gross domestic product per capita just one-fiftieth of America’s. Burma emerged in 2011 from decades of military dictatorship, but it has been racked by ethnic tensions ever since. In 2017, a violent military crackdown caused more than 600,000 mostly Muslim members of the Rohingya minority group to flee to Bangladesh, leaving an unknown number of people dead.]
By Adam Taylor
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg cut an
awkward figure this week as he appeared at much-anticipated congressional
hearings, looking visibly uncomfortable in a navy suit rather than his normal
hoodie. His demeanor earned plenty of laughs on social media, but the real
attention was focused on two things: the data firm Cambridge Analytica and
alleged Russian trolls.
According to a transcript of Zuckerberg’s
appearance before the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees, Russia was
mentioned 38 times and Cambridge Analytica 72 times on Tuesday. The next day,
as the House Energy and Commerce Committee took its turn, Russia was mentioned
34 times, Cambridge Analytica 50 times.
But Facebook’s most vexing global problem is
the misuse and abuse of the site in countries outside North America or Western
Europe. Facebook is not just a privacy issue in these countries — in some
cases, lives are literally on the line. Those problems, however, went almost
unmentioned on Capitol Hill.
Think about it this way: Many Americans
believe it took only 90 bored social media consultants in St. Petersburg to
help sway voters toward Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Now imagine what
could happen if something similar happened in one of the many countries where
Facebook is synonymous with the Internet itself.
In such countries, people and groups — even
the state itself — can have an interest in spreading misinformation to inflame
domestic tensions. And because many are smaller, poorer countries, they are
almost insignificant to Facebook’s business model and receive scant attention
from its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
There are plenty of real-world examples
already. The obvious one is Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of just under 53
million people and a gross domestic product per capita just one-fiftieth of
America’s. Burma emerged in 2011 from decades of military dictatorship, but it
has been racked by ethnic tensions ever since. In 2017, a violent military
crackdown caused more than 600,000 mostly Muslim members of the Rohingya
minority group to flee to Bangladesh, leaving an unknown number of people dead.
Civil-society and human rights organizations
say that Facebook inadvertently played a key role in spreading hate speech,
which fueled tensions between the Rohingya and Burma’s Buddhist majority. Those
groups shared a presentation with key senators this week, aiming to show how
Facebook was slow to deal with hate speech and misinformation on its platform
even after repeated attempts to flag the dangerous content.
Zuckerberg did not mention Burma in his
prepared remarks this week, but he was was asked about it. On Tuesday, Sen.
Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, highlighted
a recent comment by U.N. investigators that Facebook played a role “in inciting
possible genocide” and asked why the company took so long to remove death
threats toward one Muslim journalist there.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) also invoked the
plight of the Rohingya in another question on Tuesday. The following day, there
was only one passing mention of Burma.
Zuckerberg’s responses to questions about
Burma suggested that he had sincere concerns about Facebook’s role in the
country. "What's happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need
to do more," Zuckerberg admitted to Leahy, using another name for Burma.
But, as the Daily Beast’s Andrew Kirell noted, there was more discussion of
pro-Trump YouTube stars Diamond and Silk than there was of a potential genocide
half the world away.
Meanwhile, other countries facing similar
Facebook problems weren’t mentioned at all. On Monday, a number of activists
and independent media professionals in Vietnam had released their own open
letter to Zuckerberg, complaining about account suspensions in the country.
“Without a nuanced approach, Facebook risks enabling and being complicit in
government censorship,” the Vietnamese groups said.
In some ways, the problems with Facebook
highlighted in Vietnam and Burma may seem distinct — one is about content being
taken down too easily, and the other is about content staying up too long. But
at the core of the problem is the same criticism: Facebook doesn’t pay
attention to smaller countries.
In Sri Lanka, alleged inaction by Facebook in
the face of the spread of anti-Muslim hate speech even led the government to
temporarily block the website in March. “[Facebook] would go three or four
months before making a response,” Harin Fernando, Sri Lanka’s minister of
telecommunications and digital infrastructure, told BuzzFeed News. “We were
upset. In this incident, we had no alternative — we had to stop Facebook.”
Such drastic measures are clearly not ideal —
indeed, they raise their own questions about censorship and free speech. But
Facebook’s inability to stop real-world problems, either because of language
barriers or a lack of knowledge about local contexts, is a common criticism
around the world
To his credit, Zuckerberg acknowledged the
need to hire more people with local language skills and work with civic
organizations to identify potential problems quickly. “The definition of hate
speech or things that can be racially coded to incite violence are very
language-specific, and we can’t do that with just English speakers for people
around the world,” he said this week.
The Facebook CEO even seemed to suggest on
Wednesday that his company was working on being able to take down hate speech
like that identified in Burma within 24 hours — a passing comment that many
organizations noted with hope.
But the big question is how to do that on
Facebook’s gargantuan scale. The company has about 25,000 employees but an
estimated 2 billion or more daily users. Facebook may need to hire thousands
more people to truly deal with global issues. Small wonder that Zuckerberg
emphasized the role artificial intelligence could play in helping solve these
problems in five or 10 years’ time.
While many will want Facebook to work faster
than that, such proposals are probably welcome news for many Facebook users and
advocacy groups. But for corrupt governments and other groups who worked with
them — including consulting groups such as Cambridge Analytica — it could mean
their ability to spread hate and division will no longer be a feature of
Facebook, but a bug.