JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 25 sent personnel for training.104 Analysis of content promoted by one cluster of accounts later removed by Meta, meanwhile, indicates attacks on a journalist as a “traitor” were included among posts that they promoted. These accounts were each followed by between 1 and 5 million people.105 How much more did state-coordinated activity on Facebook contribute to the total quantity of in-group policing, for example, or to the sat­ uration of individual Facebook worlds with such practices? Ultimately, whatever their individual prospects for success, ongoing legal proceedings will be shaped by assumptions about the relationship between Facebook and genocide in ways that will have consequences in the future. Meta only began sharing data that could be important evidence after requests from advocates and investigators were reinforced by a court order.106 In such situations, what investigators seek to acquire, what courts compel companies to share, and how this material is eventually analyzed may be shaped by assumptions about how action on a social media platform – and, by extension, what forms of content – could potentially be linked to violence. The corollary to this is that these assumptions will also shape what companies do not share, what investigators do not request, and what they ignore. In June 2023, for example, the successor to the UN Fact-Finding Mission indicated that it had completed a “major analytical report” on the organized spread of hate speech on Facebook by the Myanmar military.107 The report is not currently public. But this article demonstrates the importance of broadening analy­ sis beyond the narrow focus on content characterizing the Rohingya previously exhibited in the Fact-Finding Mission report and other research. That such investigations take up the question of in-group policing has an urgency that extends beyond the life of any single legal process. As Meta decides what content to store and what to destroy, signifi­ cant evidence may be lost forever.108 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Sean Bain, Nick Cheesman, Mary Kate Long, Benedict Mette-Starke, Mike McGovern, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Jennifer Sierra, David Simon, Matthew Venker, and participants in the Linguistic Anthropology Lab and EthnoLab at the University of Michigan for reading drafts of this article and providing comment, as well as to Matthew Bugher, Penny Green, Kyaw Zeyar Win, Chris Lewa, and Benjamin Meiches for important early conversations. The article also benefited from presentations at the Myanmar Research Centre, Australian National University; and the Program in Genocide Studies, Yale University, where an earlier version was also shared as “Facebook 104 105 106 107 108 Donald M. Seekins, “Friends Distant Yet Near: Relations Between Myanmar and Russia, 1917–2022,” in ASEAN and Regional Actors in the Indo-Pacific, ed. Sueo Sudo and Chosein Yamahata (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2023), 243– 65; International Crisis Group, “Coming to Terms with Myanmar’s Russia Embrace” (Brussels, 4 August 2022), 6; Maung Aung Myoe, Building the Tatmadaw: Myanmar Armed Forces Since 1948 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 139. Ronzaud et al., “Myanmar Inauthentic Behavior Takedown,” 1–2. In September 2021, Meta was ordered to share relevant content with the Gambia, pursuant to its case against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice. Poppy Mcpherson, “U.S. Court Orders Facebook to Release Anti-Rohin­ gya Content Records for Genocide Case,” Reuters, 23 September 2021. Only a full year later did the UN investigatory mechanism report receiving data from Meta. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Human Rights Council Discusses Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar and in Sri Lanka” (Geneva, 12 September 2022). Human Rights Council, “Report of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar,” Fifty-fourth session (Geneva, 11 October 2023), 6–7. Anna Banchik, “Disappearing Acts: Content Moderation and Emergent Practices to Preserve at-Risk Human Rights– Related Content,” New Media & Society 23, no. 6 (1 June 2021): 1527–44; Olivia Mooney et al., “Social Media Evidence of Alleged Gross Human Rights Abuses: Improving Preservation and Access Through Policy Reform,” Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era Working Paper No. 1 (Genocide Studies Program, Yale University, March 2021).