4/4/22, 10:39 AM Mark Zuckerberg Sent An Apology Letter About Myanmar. These NGOs Called It “Grossly Insufficient.” At least one US senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, may ask Zuckerberg about the company’s role in the Rohingya crisis when he testifies in a joint hearing with the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday. Kennedy addressed the issue in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “I do want them to stop the fake news,” he said. “I do want them to stop people from running advertisements on Facebook that encourages the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. These are deep issues. They’re going to go away, and we’re not going to conclude this in one hearing.” BuzzFeed News is not aware of any advertisers that have encouraged genocide on Facebook, though it’s possible that the senator was referring to the spread of viral organic content, not paid posts. A spokesperson for the senator did not return a request for clarification on the matter. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the senator's statement. Here Is Mark Zuckerberg's full letter to the groups: Dear Htaike Htaike, Jes, Victoire, Phyu Phyu and Thant, I wanted to personally respond to your open letter. Thank you for writing it and I apologize for not being sufficiently clear about the important role that your organizations play in helping us understand and respond to Myanmar-related issues, including the September incident you referred to. In making my remarks, my intention was to highlight how we’re building artificial intelligence to help us better identify abusive, hateful or false content even before it is flagged by our community. These improvements in technology and tools are the kinds of solutions that your organizations have called on us to implement and we are committed to doing even more. For example, we are rolling out improvements to our reporting mechanism in Messenger to make it easier to find and simpler for people to report conversations. 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. We have also increased the number of people across the company on Myanmar-related 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. There are several other improvements we have made or are making, and I have directed my teams to ensure we are doing all we can to get your feedback and keep you informed. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/mark-zuckerbeg-apology-myanmar-ngos-insufficient 4/6