9/24/21, 8:16 PM Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar “Just feed them to the pigs” October 2016 “If it’s kalar, get rid of the whole race” October 2016 Madden had founded a technology hub and start-up accelerator in Yangon called Phandeeyar. He said he and others involved with the venture interacted with Facebook “many dozens” of times over the next several years, including via email, in the private Facebook group and in person, showing how the network’s systems for detecting and removing dangerous content were ineffective. He isn’t sure what steps the company took in response. “The central problem is that the mechanisms that they have to pull down hate speech in a timely way, before it does real world harm, they don’t work,” he said. Madden and Jes Kaliebe Petersen, Phandeeyar’s chief executive, said Facebook was still relying too much on their group and other volunteers to report dangerous posts. “It shouldn’t be incumbent on an organization like ours or people who happen to be well-connected with folks inside Facebook to report these things,” Petersen said. In April, shortly before Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony, Phandeeyar and five other Myanmar groups blasted him for claiming in an interview with Vox that Facebook’s systems had detected and removed incendiary messages in September last year. “We believe your system, in this case, was us,” they wrote. Zuckerberg apologized. Back in 2014, tech organizations and researchers weren’t the only ones sounding alarms with Facebook. So was the Myanmar government. In July of that year, riots broke out in the central city of Mandalay after false rumors spread online, on Facebook and elsewhere, that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist woman. A Buddhist man and a Muslim man were killed in the fighting. The Myanmar government asked Tun, then a Deloitte consultant, to contact the company. He said he didn’t succeed at first, and the government briefly blocked Facebook. Tun said he eventually helped to arrange meetings between the government and Facebook. “What they promised to do was, when you spot fake news, you could contact them via email,” Tun said of Facebook. “And they would take action – they were willing to take down pages after their own verification process.” The government began reporting cases to Facebook, but Tun said he quickly realized the company couldn’t deal with Burmese text. “Honestly, Facebook had no clue about Burmese content. They were totally unprepared,” he said. “We had to translate it into English for them.” ’I don’t know the language’ In August 2013, Zuckerberg announced a plan to make the internet available for the first time to billions of people in developing countries. “Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” he said. The company would now work, he added, to make “internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.” But in Myanmar, the language barrier would cause trouble. Most people here don’t speak English. Although Myanmar users at the time could post on Facebook in Burmese, the platform’s interface – including its system for reporting problematic posts – was in English. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ 8/13