[For years, Facebook ignored dehumanizing anti-Rohingya propaganda on its Myanmar pages, despite substantial evidence that it was leading to mass killings, rape and the destruction of villages. After United Nations investigators criticized Facebook last year for playing a “determining role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the flight of 700,000 refugees, Mr. Zuckerberg told the United States Senate: “What’s happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more.”]
By
Vindu Goel and Shaikh Azizur Rahman
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“Many groups demonized us
on Facebook and WhatsApp, and they succeeded in
whipping up a strong
anti-Rohingya passion,” said Mohammad Salim, a
Rohingya refugee in West
Bengal, India. Credit Shaikh Azizur Rahman
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KOLKATA,
India — Mohammad Salim, a
Rohingya Muslim refugee, thought he had left genocidal violence and Facebook
vitriol behind when he fled his native country, Myanmar, in 2013.
But lately, his new home, India’s West Bengal
state, has not felt much safer. And once again, Facebook is a big part of the
problem.
During India’s recent national elections, Mr.
Salim said, he saw Facebook posts that falsely accused Rohingya Muslims of
cannibalism go viral, along with posts that threatened to burn their homes if
they did not leave India. Some Hindu nationalists called the Rohingya
terrorists and shared videos on the social network in which the leader of
India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party vowed to expel the minority group and
other Muslim “termites.” A week ago, new posts popped up falsely accusing the
Rohingya of killing B.J.P. workers in West Bengal.
“Many groups demonized us on Facebook and
WhatsApp, and they succeeded in whipping up a strong anti-Rohingya passion in the
state,” Mr. Salim, 29, said in a recent interview in a village near Kolkata,
West Bengal’s capital.
He said he had quit selling fruit juice at
local rail stations and was moving with his pregnant wife and two toddlers to a
new, undisclosed location — their fourth home in the past 15 months — because
he was afraid of being attacked by right-wing Hindus or arrested.
Mr. Salim’s experience, echoed in interviews
with other Rohingya Muslims who sought refuge in India, shows the widening,
real-world repercussions of Facebook’s failure to stop anti-Rohingya hate
speech on its platform, an issue that the company’s chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg, promised last year to solve.
For years, Facebook ignored dehumanizing
anti-Rohingya propaganda on its Myanmar pages, despite substantial evidence
that it was leading to mass killings, rape and the destruction of villages.
After United Nations investigators criticized Facebook last year for playing a
“determining role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the flight of
700,000 refugees, Mr. Zuckerberg told the United States Senate: “What’s
happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more.”
But anti-Rohingya hate speech and falsehoods
have since spread to India, where Facebook has 340 million users. That is
creating the potential for violence in tinderbox regions like West Bengal, a
Hindu-majority state with a substantial Muslim population, where the B.J.P. has
stoked fears of Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. In total, the government
estimates there are about 40,000 Rohingya in India.
“Hate speech and misinformation is adding
fuel to the already existing hatred towards the Rohingyas,” said Mariya Salim,
an independent activist on minority and women’s rights who lives in Kolkata.
“It’s not a secret that online calls for violence can easily turn into
real-life threats.”
Facebook said it had made progress in
combating anti-Rohingya hate speech. The Silicon Valley company has assembled a
team of 100 people who speak Burmese to review posts from Myanmar, which was
formerly known as Burma. It banned some military accounts responsible for hate
speech. And it said it had trained its algorithms to better detect hate speech
globally, claiming that it now removes about two-thirds of such posts before
anyone even complains about them.
“We don’t want our services to be used to
spread hate, incite violence or fuel tension against any ethnic group in any
country — including the Rohingya in India,” Facebook said in a statement. “We have
clear rules against hate speech and credible threats of violence, and we use a
combination of technology and reports to help us identify and remove such
content.”
Yet Facebook is limited in its ability to
eradicate hate speech and false information. It relies heavily on users to
report inappropriate posts and on third-party partners to assess falsehoods,
which means only some of the offending material is caught. The company’s
employees and contractors often lack the linguistic and cultural knowledge
necessary to gauge the offline risks posed by certain content. And Facebook’s
focus on individual posts means it can overlook the long-term impact of
sustained hate campaigns.
“I think Facebook keeps thinking they can
solve this within the bunker of their offices and not with the collaboration of
the communities who are affected,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of
Equality Labs, a human rights group that tracks hate speech in India.
Anti-Rohingya hate speech can also be found
on Twitter and YouTube. But Facebook is far more influential than those
services in India.
Ms. Soundararajan said that such speech on
Indian Facebook pages started to increase in early 2018 when the country held
elections for the upper house of Parliament. It escalated late last year as the
elections for the more important lower house of Parliament approached.
Dealing with anti-Rohingya content was made harder
by the B.J.P., which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hoping to win
Hindu votes in heavily Muslim states like West Bengal, the party campaigned on
a promise to expel Muslim “infiltrators” and to make India — which is about 80
percent Hindu but constitutionally secular — into a Hindu nation. B.J.P.
supporters used false information and criticism of Rohingya refugees as
shorthand for broader anti-Muslim sentiments, Ms. Soundararajan said.
She said she had warned Facebook officials
last fall about the spike in anti-Rohingya hate speech and had provided
specific examples. But they did little to address the problem, she said.
Since then, anti-Rohingya posts directed at
Indians have circulated widely on Facebook. In one video, a gang of men from
the B.J.P.’s militant wing brandishes knives and burns the effigy of a child.
“Rohingyas, go back!” the men scream in English and Hindi. This month, dozens
of Rohingya homes were burned in Jammu, where the video and similar ones were
shot.
Facebook said it had decided not to remove
the videos because they were posted by entities claiming to be news
organizations and were not directly linked to violence.
Users also posted gruesome images of human
arms and other body parts and falsely claimed that the Rohingya were cannibals.
The images were often removed because they violated Facebook’s rules against
graphic violence and hate speech, yet they kept resurfacing.
Other videos inaccurately said that Rohingya
Muslims had attacked B.J.P. workers and beaten up a Hindu priest in West
Bengal. Facebook said that after independent fact checkers disproved these claims,
it buried those posts.
In a more subtle attack, two Indian
actresses, Payal Rohatgi and Koena Mitra, championed the anti-Rohingya cause on
Facebook and Twitter. Ms. Mitra accused Rohingya refugees of being terrorists
and criminals. Facebook removed some images posted by Ms. Mitra after The New
York Times inquired about them.
An extremist state lawmaker, Raja Singh,
whose official Facebook page was banned in March over his anti-Muslim hate
speech, set up another page weeks later. In one older video still on Facebook,
he called the Rohingya “insects” and “worms” and said that they should be shot
if they did not leave India voluntarily. The company said Mr. Singh had not
violated its rules since his return.
Facebook said its efforts to fight hate
speech were a work in progress.
“We still have a long way to go,” said Rosa
Birch, director of the company’s strategic response team.
Ms. Birch’s year-old team is figuring out how
to tackle issues such as “divisive” posts that do not violate the social
network’s rules. It is also experimenting with new techniques for preventing
violence, including a temporary restriction on the sharing of posts in Sri
Lanka after Muslim-led terrorist bombings there last Easter.
In addition, Facebook said it was
supplementing its 15,000 human content reviewers by teaming up with civil
society groups in various countries to help it assess potentially violent or
threatening speech. It declined to disclose the names of its partners.
For the Rohingya in India, those explanations
are of little comfort.
Hossain Gazi, a social worker in West Bengal
who built huts and rented homes last year to house several hundred Rohingya
refugees, including Mr. Salim’s family, said that after his efforts received
some publicity, right-wing Hindu groups visited, took photographs and made
threats on Facebook and via phone against the Rohingya living there.
“They even wrote in several social media
posts that I was running a terrorist training camp for the Rohingya and the
authorities should arrest and jail me,” he said. All the Rohingya refugees soon
left his camps, he said.
Abdul Goni, a Rohingya refugee who lived in
India from 2012 until fleeing to Bangladesh last year, said that Rohingya
Muslims had used WhatsApp, where messages are private, to circulate some of the
threatening videos from right-wing Hindu groups and to warn one another of
impending danger.
As for Facebook, which is more public, Mr.
Goni said that many Rohingya had deactivated their accounts on the social
network. Others have stayed on it to monitor what is being said about them but
have hidden their location and erased videos and photos — anything that would
link them to the Rohingya community.
Mr. Salim, who has since moved from his West
Bengal location, said it was as if he had gone full circle.
“My family fled violence in Burma and took
refuge in India,” he said. “We are being hounded again in this country.”
Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.
Karan Deep Singh contributed reporting.
