9/24/21, 8:16 PM Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar Of all of Facebook’s travails, though, Myanmar may be the bloodiest. The Myanmar military stands accused by the U.N. of having conducted a brutal campaign of killings, mass rape, arson and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. The government denies the allegations. The social media giant doesn’t make public its data on hate speech in Myanmar. It says it has 2.2 billion global users and each week receives millions of user reports from around the world about problematic content. In compiling examples of hate speech for this article, Reuters found some that Facebook subsequently removed. But the vast majority remained online as of early August. After Reuters alerted Facebook to some of the derogatory posts included in this story, the company said it removed them. “All of it violated our policies,” it said. Reuters itself sometimes flags to Facebook threats posted on the platform against its reporters. These include the Burmese journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who are on trial in Myanmar on charges of violating a state secrets law. The two were arrested in December while reporting on the massacre of 10 Rohingya men and have received a deluge of death threats on social media over their story. Facebook has removed such content several times at the news agency’s request. ’Sending flowers’ Myanmar emerged from decades of military rule in 2011, but religious violence has marred its transition to democracy. In 2012, clashes in Rakhine State between ethnic Rakhine, who are Buddhists, and the Rohingya killed scores of people and left 140,000 displaced – mostly Muslims. Facebook’s extraordinary dominance in Myanmar began taking root around the same time. But not by design. As recently as six years ago, Myanmar was one of the least connected countries on earth. In 2012, only 1.1 percent of the population used the internet and few people had telephones, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. The junta that had ruled the country for decades kept citizens isolated. That all changed in 2013, when a quasi-civilian government oversaw the deregulation of telecommunications. The state-owned phone company suddenly faced competition from two foreign mobile-phone entrants from Norway and Qatar.  UBIQUITOUS: A cellphone user looks at a Facebook page in a shop in downtown Yangon in early August. For many in Myanmar, Facebook is the internet. REUTERS/Ann Wang The price of SIM cards dropped from more than $200 to as little as $2 and people purchased them in droves. By 2016, nearly half the population had mobile phone subscriptions, according to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry’s trade association. Most purchased smartphones with internet access. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ 5/13