JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2375122 Beyond Hate Speech and Misinformation: Facebook and the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar Matt Schissler a,b a Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; bDepartment of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The case of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar has increasingly come to illustrate the maximum evil of Facebook and its parent company, Meta. Yet most analyses of this case share a distinctive feature that radically narrows the scope of the problem: the focus is only on content that negatively characterizes the Rohingya, whether through hate speech, misinformation, or other efforts to construct them in ways that may be used to justify genocide. Such content is an important matter of concern. It warrants action, independent of causal effect. But the question of what conduct and content on Facebook may help cause violence must include analysis of a broader potential range that extends beyond characterizations of the victims. To specify some of this range, the article turns to scholarship from the field of genocide studies. In particular, it looks to the process of “in-group policing,” which involves constructing not just victims of genocide but also those who are supposed to support it. The bulk of the article then analyzes in-group policing in Myanmar and on Facebook, by offering new interpretations of publicly available evidence and drawing on observations from work in Myanmar during the five years before large-scale military attacks on the Rohingya in 2016–17. The article concludes by discussing the implications of its findings for ongoing efforts to pursue restitution and accountability for the Rohingya genocide, and proposing concrete questions with broad relevance for scholars and practitioners. Received 22 January 2024 Accepted 18 June 2024 KEYWORDS Hate speech; misinformation; Facebook; Rohingya genocide; Myanmar Introduction For the broad public increasingly critical of technology companies, genocide in Myanmar has come to illustrate the maximum evil of Facebook and its parent company, Meta.1 This CONTACT Matt Schissler matt.schissler@anu.edu.au Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 1 For example, in an article penned in 2019, Elliott Prasse-Freeman cited references to Facebook and genocide in Myanmar by a wide range of sources, from leading journalists to television comedians. Prasse-Freeman, “Hate Bait, Micro-Publics, and National(ist) Conversations on Burmese Facebook,” Independent Journal of Burmese Scholar­ ship 1 (2021). The assumption that the causal relationship between Facebook and the Rohingya genocide is an estab­ lished fact has only further solidified in subsequent years. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.