9/24/21, 8:16 PM Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar One app went viral: Facebook. Many saw it as an all-in-one solution – offering a messaging system, news, and videos and other entertainment. It also became a status symbol, said Chris Tun, a former Deloitte consultant who advised the government. “If you don’t use Facebook, you’re behind,” he said. “Even grandmas, everyone was on Facebook.” To capture customers, Myanmar’s mobile phone operators began offering a sweet deal: use Facebook without paying any data charges. “Facebook should be sending flowers to me, because we have been an accelerator for bringing the penetration,” said Lars Erik Tellmann, who until July was chief executive of Telenor Myanmar, part of Norway’s Telenor Group. “This was an initiative we took fully on our own. And this was extremely popular.” 2014: 1.2m 2015: 7.3m 2016: 11m 2017: 15m 2018: 18m (Facebook users in Myanmar in millions) Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite, Kepios and Facebook In Myanmar today, the government itself uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the president in March. ’Genocide all of the Muslims’ In the fall of 2013, Aela Callan, an Australian documentary filmmaker studying at Stanford University, began a project on hate speech and false reports that had spread online during conflicts between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims the prior year. In June 2012, at least 80 people had died in riots and thousands of Rohingya were moved into squalid internment camps. Anti-Rohingya diatribes appeared on Facebook. One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.” In November 2013, she met at Facebook’s California headquarters with Elliott Schrage, vice president of communications and public policy. “I was trying to alert him to the problems,” she said. Emails between the two show that Schrage put Callan in touch with internet.org, a Facebook initiative to bring the internet to developing countries, and with two Facebook officials, including one who worked with civil-society organizations to assist the company in coping with hate speech. “He didn’t connect me to anyone inside Facebook who could deal with the actual problem,” she said. Asked for comment, Schrage referred Reuters to a press person at Facebook. The company didn’t comment on the meeting. Matt Schissler, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, said that between March and December 2014, he held discussions with Facebook officials in a series of calls and online communications. He told them how the platform was being used to spread hate speech and false rumors in Myanmar, he said, including via fake accounts. He and other activists provided the company with specific examples, including a Facebook page in Burmese that was called, “We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs.” The page was removed. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ 6/13