4 M. SCHISSLER urgent call for contributions from the field of genocide studies: attempts to understand how social media may contribute to genocide are likely to be malformed until assumptions about the latter have been addressed.16 Section II thus draws from scholarship establishing that mobilizing genocide requires more than generating hatred. It requires constructing not just victims of genocide but also those who are supposed to support it.17 In particular, Section II looks to the process of “in-group policing,” which Brubaker and Laitin define as “the formal or informal administration of sanctions … within a group so as to enforce a certain line of action vis-à-vis outsiders.”18 Sections III and IV then analyze in-group policing in Myanmar and on Facebook, by offering new interpretations of publicly-available evi­ dence and drawing on observations from work with local organizations in Myanmar.19 These sections focus on the five years before the 2016–17 “clearance operations,” when conditions for the Rohingya, already bad from preceding decades, worsened drastically and also prepared the way for violence as it escalated. They find that the availability of Face­ book transformed in-group policing during this period because it offered a unique capa­ bility to transform threats into public displays. A conclusion discusses the relevance of this finding for ongoing efforts to pursue restitution and accountability for the Rohingya genocide and proposes concrete questions that could be taken up in these efforts while also having broader relevance for scholars and practitioners. In-Group Policing Research linking Facebook to the Rohingya genocide has primarily focused on a narrow range of evidence, limited in scope to content that negatively characterized the Rohingya. For example: the most influential source, the report of the UN Fact Finding Mission, ident­ ified five background factors that were necessary: (1) years of “concerted hate campaigns” against the Rohingya, (2) decades of gradual marginalization, (3) the denial of legal 16 17 18 19 significance of other factors. For an example of this tendency, see Oren Samet, Leonardo Arriola, and Aila Matanock, “Facebook Usage and Outgroup Intolerance in Myanmar,” Political Communication (2024): 1–21 (arguing that high “levels of intolerance” and “intergroup hostility,” independent of Facebook, “complicates” and “cuts against” concern that it contributed to violence against the Rohingya). Meta’s lawyers have argued similarly: Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher LLP, “Motion by Defendant Meta Platforms, Inc. to Dismiss Complaint Pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6)” (2022), 7. For example, Samet, Arriola, and Matanock (2024) is framed as a rebuttal to concerns about Facebook and the Rohin­ gya genocide but does not cite any scholarship on how such violence occurs. By grounding this article in genocide studies, rather than other relevant fields such as social media, I also adapt a principle of digital ethnography from Pink et al., who advocate “de-centering” media technologies in attempts to study them. See, Sarah Pink et al., Digital Eth­ nography: Principles and Practice (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2016), 9–11. To say this is to say that genocide is a social process that involves conflicts among a host of actors, including among those identified with the dominant group, who may later become perpetrators or otherwise facilitate violence. This does not imply that the Rohingya genocide simply resulted from a conflict among two equal parties. Rogers Brubaker and David Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” Annual Review of Sociology 24, no. 1 (1998): 433; republished in Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), Chap. 4. I begin from the premise that content on Facebook is an index of sociality, in that it both points to forms of social life and becomes a part of the practices that create them. Tom Boellstorff, “Rethinking Digital Anthropology,” in Digital Anthropology, ed. Heather Horst and Daniel Miller (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39–60; John Postill and Sarah Pink, “Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web,” Media International Australia 145, no. 1 (1 November 2012): 123–34. I thus approach Facebook as what Elsherif calls an “archive of everyday life”: to be read with and against the grain, while attending to the construction of the archive and the sources it contains. Nermin Elsherif, “Social Media, the Archives of Tomorrow,” in Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures, ed. Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2023), 25–38; Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2015 [1995]). I also conclude with brief notes on implications for Face­ book as an archive of evidence for genocide and other crimes.