5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED organizations in rural areas prior to the 2012 violence in Rakhine as a more pernicious vehicle for spreading disinformation. This skepticism about the risks of Facebook was rooted in part in a fear that the government or military would use hate speech as an excuse to censor or block certain websites that it did not agree with. The fear of web suppression was not unfounded. Myanmar had in the past restricted access to the internet, notably during the 2007 monk-led popular uprising dubbed the “Saffron Revolution,” in an failed attempt to keep news of the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown from leaking out. “The answer to bad speech, is more speech. More communication, more voices,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said in Yangon in March 2013. The Myanmar public was, “in for the ride of your life right now,” he added in the speech that was a gleeful take on the positives Myanmar would reap from its technological and telecoms liberation. I N E A R LY 2 0 1 5, in collaboration with local tech civil society groups, Facebook made a set of digital stickers available on the messenger platform. The stickers were part of the broader “Panzagar” campaign, “flower speech” in English, launched by activists, including former political prisoners, to counter hate speech and promote online inclusion. While the project gained considerable media attention, some critics said it still failed to address the underlying issues on Facebook. “People gave [Facebook] a lot of credit for that, but it seemed to be the smallest gesture to be made,” says a former US tech company official who worked extensively in Myanmar. “People died, but now you can use this digital sticker.” That year, a collection of civil society groups also began working with Facebook to flag dangerous posts and misinformation on the platform, hoping to speed up the removal time for content that could fuel violence, according to three people involved in the effort who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the work. This emergency escalation system, which still operates in largely the same manner, relies on a small group of individuals finding potentially dangerous posts, contacting Facebook officials, often times Garlick, who then expedite the referral of the content to a moderation team for review and potential removal. Garlick declined to comment on the group’s work citing security concerns. But the process lacks scalability and is not efficient, those involved say. In one case in late November 2017, it took three days from initial flagging of a post threatening a prominent journalist to its removal, by which time it had been copied and shared numerous times. The journalist, fearing for their safety, left the country that month and has not returned. “Facebook wasn’t staffed to deal with a crisis and it sounds like they still aren’t,” the former US tech official says. “All internet companies are like this to some degree, but especially Facebook because it is so leanly staffed on the government relations side. They are engineering companies and they don’t like spending money where there is not a clear [return on investment].” Madden, the tech hub founder, flew to California in May 2015 to speak to Facebook executives about Myanmar’s massive growth in online users and the rise of Buddhist nationalism, he also delivered a stark message to Facebook. In a lengthy presentation to company officials, he said Facebook risked being a platform used to foment widespread violence, akin to the way radio broadcasts were used to incite killings during the Rwandan genocide. https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 10/16