5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED killing of Rohingya Muslims during a campaign launched last year after militant attacks on police posts. The UN lambasted Facebook’s conduct in the crisis, which the global body says "bears the hallmarks of genocide,” by serving as a platform for hate speech and disinformation, saying Facebook had "turned into a beast.” At the same time, Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg are under global pressure for mishandling users’ data and the part the company played in influencing elections, particularly in the the United States. In April, Zuckerberg testified before Congress over two days on a myriad of problems within his company, from Russian agents using the platform to influence the US elections to a lack of data protections. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April. He told Congress in written testimony that he is "responsible for" not preventing the social media platform from being used for harm, including fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech. TING SHEN/XINHUA/ALAMY Myanmar came up in the hearings too. Why, the legislators wanted to know, hadn’t the company responded sooner to issues raised there. Zuckerberg said Facebook had a three-pronged approach to address issues in Myanmar— “dramatically” ramp up its local language content reviewers, take down accounts of individuals and groups that generate hate speech, and introduce products specially designed for the country, though he offered few details on what these would entail. Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook needed to improve came too late for some critics who said he failed to adequately take responsibility for what has been a long-term issue. (UPDATE, July 19, 2018: Facebook announced on July 18 that it would expand its efforts to remove material that could incite violence.) "From at least that Mandalay incident, Facebook knew. There were a few things done in late 2014 and 2015 and there was some effort made to try to understand the issues, but it wasn’t a fraction of what was needed,” says David Madden, a gregarious Australian who in 2014 founded Phandeeyar, a techhub in Yangon, the country’s largest city, that helped Facebook launch its Burmese language community standards. “That’s not 20/20 hindsight. The scale of this problem was significant and it was already apparent." https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 6/16