4/4/22, 10:39 AM Mark Zuckerberg Sent An Apology Letter About Myanmar. These NGOs Called It “Grossly Insufficient.” Since last summer, more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh due to what the United Nations has termed “ethnic cleansing.” The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar said last month that social media sites, namely Facebook, played a “determining role” in spreading misinformation and hate speech that led to violence. In examples shared with BuzzFeed News on Monday, Rio detailed inappropriate posts that were allowed to proliferate on Facebook despite being flagged by the NGOs. In one, from December 2017, users circulated a list of Rohingya Muslim community leaders or activists “to be assassinated.” Rio said there are still at least 20 public duplicates of the post that are still live on Facebook today. On Monday, BuzzFeed News was able to search for and find posts calling for the assassination of activists that back to December 2017. Last week in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Zuckerberg said that Facebook was “paying a lot of attention” to anti-Rohingya propaganda and that “our systems detect that that’s going on.” That prompted a response from critics in Myanmar, leading to a subsequent apology from the company on Friday. "We should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content," a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News last week. "We are rolling out the ability to report content in Messenger, and have added more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from across all our services." Zuckerberg’s letter to the groups followed that. “In addition to improving our technology and tools, we have added dozens more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from users across all our services,” he wrote. “We have also increased the number of people across the company on Myanmarrelated issues and we now we [sic] have a special product team working to better understand the specific local challenges and build the right tools to help keep people there safe.” His critics are asking for other meaningful solutions. The six NGOs, whose members had previously reported issues to Facebook’s staff using Skype or other messaging channels, said they want a “transparent emergency escalation system” after experiencing several delays with the previous methods of communication. “When things go wrong in Myanmar, the consequences can be really serious — potentially disastrous,” the groups said in a response letter. “You have yourself publicly acknowledged the risk of the platform being abused towards real harm.” ADVERTISEMENT A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/mark-zuckerbeg-apology-myanmar-ngos-insufficient 3/6