5/22/22, 6:58 PM Zuckerberg Was Called Out Over Myanmar Violence. Here’s His Apology. - The New York Times Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal email did not quell the activists’ frustration. The groups say the biggest obstruction to their attempts to push back against a torrent of dangerous hate speech is not their lack of resources but Facebook itself. They said Facebook had a history of pledging to do more to help quell ethnic violence in Myanmar but had not fulfilled its promises. “It’s great that he’s engaging personally with this, but the stuff he’s talking about is really not that much different from what they’ve been saying for the past few years,” said Jes Petersen, the chief executive of Phandeeyar, an innovation lab in Myanmar that has worked with Facebook to produce localized versions of its community standards. A Facebook spokeswoman, Debbie Frost, confirmed the authenticity of Mr. Zuckerberg’s email, and said Facebook was planning to continue engaging with the activists. Years after civil society groups first began flagging hate speech in Myanmar, the company still has no permanent office or staff in the country and seems to be struggling to give its platform sufficient oversight. In Germany, where hate speech laws require vigilant attention from content reviewers, Facebook has hired about 1,200 moderators. In order to achieve the same ratio of users to moderators in Myanmar, Facebook would need to have around 800 reviewers in the country, Mr. Petersen calculated. “Dozens of content reviewers is not going to cut it,” he said. The civil society groups have already responded to Mr. Zuckerberg’s reply, asking for hard data about Facebook’s efforts in the region, including how many Burmese-speaking reviewers the company has, how many accounts the company has taken down in Myanmar and how long, on average, it takes for Facebook to respond to reports of hate speech. “A lot of what they’ve been doing is cosmetic — it’s not the tangible improvement we’re looking for,” said Victoire Rio, a social media analyst in Myanmar who was named in Mr. Zuckerberg’s reply. Activists in other developing countries have raised similar complaints about Facebook’s behavior. In Indonesia, politicians have called Facebook executives to account for the spread of disinformation. In the Philippines, critics of President Rodrigo Duterte have faced barrages of threatening posts. Last month, the government of Sri Lanka ordered Facebook blocked in an attempt to stem mob violence against Muslim communities. Last month, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s News Feed head, said in an interview that he and other Facebook executives “lose some sleep” over the possibility that Facebook had led to real-world violence. Mr. Petersen said he hoped Mr. Zuckerberg’s appeal would spur actual change and not just expressions of worry. “I wonder how he spent those sleepless nights — because we didn’t see that much change,” he said. Here is the full text of Mr. Zuckerberg’s email to the civil society groups, followed by the groups’ response: Mark Zuckerberg’s email Dear Htaike Htaike, Jes, Victoire, Phyu Phyu and Thant, I wanted to personally respond to your open letter. Thank you for writing it and I apologize for not being sufficiently clear about the important role that your organizations play in helping us understand and respond to Myanmar-related issues, including the September incident you referred to. In making my remarks, my intention was to highlight how we’re building artificial intelligence to help us better identify abusive, hateful or false content even before it is flagged by our community. These improvements in technology and tools are the kinds of solutions that your organizations have called on us to implement and we are committed to doing even more. For example, we are rolling out improvements to our reporting mechanism in Messenger to make it easier to find and simpler for people to report conversations. In addition to improving our technology and tools, we have added dozens more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from users across all our services. We have also increased the number of people across the company on Myanmar-related issues and we now we have a special product team working to better understand the specific local challenges and build the right tools to help keep people there safe. There are several other improvements we have made or are making, and I have directed my teams to ensure we are doing all we can to get your feedback and keep you informed. We are grateful for your support as we map out our ongoing work in Myanmar, and we are committed to working with you to find more ways to be responsive to these important issues. Mark The civil society groups’ response. The half-dozen signatories of the response include Phandeeyar, a leading technology hub in the country; the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, which monitors online hate speech; and the Center for Social Integrity. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar-zuckerberg.html?mtrref=undefined 2/3