5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED “A small collection of civil society groups is not going to solve this problem,” says Madden, who now serves as Phandeeyar’s president. “This is where the culpability comes in, this was made clear at numerous points along the way. The volume of hate speech required serious product changes. This was clear well before 2017.” It was not just domestic groups who were raising concerns. C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that has worked with firms like data company Palantir, released an exhaustive report detailing hate speech trends and its facilitators in February 2016. By analyzing the Facebook accounts of 100 monks, politicians, activists, government officials, and laypeople, the group found what it described as a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes Muslims.” Monks and protesters in Yangon, Myanmar, shout during a March 2015 march to denounce foreign criticism of the country's treatment of stateless Rohingya Muslims. AUBREY BELFORD/REUTERS People and Buddhist monks protest the arrival of a Malaysian NGO's aid ship carrying food and emergency supplies for Rohingya Muslims. SOE ZEYA TUN/REUTERS In addition to posts, researchers found that “crude and dehumanizing anti-Muslim imagery and language is regularly woven into ‘memes’” including widely shared ones portraying bestiality aimed at Muslims and the “Prophet Muhammed being orally penetrated.” Still Facebook pressed on with Myanmar expansion, launching in June 2016 its Free Basics program with Myanma Post and Telecommunications, despite huge issues with the program in neighboring India. The service, which was never adopted by Telenor or Oooredoo, was quietly shuttered in Myanmar due to government regulation changes the following year. Madden says he met again with Facebook officials in January 2017 as did two other people familiar with the gathering, which took place in Menlo Park. The meeting was born in large part out of continued disappointment with the company’s inability to quickly address hate speech. There was also mounting frustration over Facebook’s stubborn resistance to sharing information with the civil society groups they relied so heavily on, like the number of people working on Burmese language content monitoring. “We were very prescriptive,” says Madden, who described one slide in the presentation as simply a picture of a large question mark meant to highlight Facebook’s lack of transparency. Garlick acknowledges that the company has been “too slow,” to respond to issues raised by civil society groups. “There is more we need to do and we will continue to work with civil society groups in Myanmar to listen, learn, and make progress,” she says. https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 11/16