In 2013, almost five years ago, Zeynep Tufecki, a leading researcher on social implications of digital connectivity, tweeted: zeynep tufekci @zeynep Last year, I pondered the "first social-media fueled ethnic cleansing." With ethnic tensions & expanding online hate speech, is it Burma? 7:45 PM · Jul 22, 2013 39 Reply Copy link Read 1 reply That is to say: The recent events were not only foreseeable, but they were actually foreseen. Reporting at the time documented the proliferation of hate speech on the platform. A 2014 New York Times article on violent riots that left two dead described how the riots were “set off” by unconfirmed rumours of a rape on Facebook and noted the influence of Wirathu’s radical teachings. And yet Facebook has largely been an “absentee landlord” in Myanmar, as Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, has put it. Facebook has no office in Myanmar, which makes it much more difficult for the company to evaluate the complicated factors inherent in content moderation decisions that require deep understanding of context. Facebook does not disclose how many content moderators it has with local language expertise—those it does have appear to work in Dublin, where it apparently has some difficulty finding qualified candidates. During the congressional hearings earlier this month, Zuckerberg was prepared to answer questions about his company’s role in Myanmar with a three-step plan: hiring dozens more Burmese-language content reviewers, working with civil society in Myanmar to take down accounts of “specific hate figures,” and creating a product team to implement (unspecified) product changes in Myanmar and other countries that may have similar issues in the future. But Zuckerberg announced these steps only after a large amount of recent press coverage of the situation. Even as recently as March 15 this year, Facebook didn’t seem to have a plan. In an interview with Slate, Facebook’s head of newsfeed, Adam Mosseri, said that while people at the company “lose some sleep over this,” the situation was particularly challenging for a number of reasons--including that there were no local third-party fact-checkers for Facebook to partner with. Civil society organizations in Myanmar have capitalized on public attention, publishing an open letter specifying the problems of Facebook’s content moderation in the country, in particular: an over-reliance on third parties (to flag content, if they came across it in time, rather than monitoring for such content itself); a lack of proper emergency escalation mechanism (it had taken days for Facebook to step in after the organizations had tried to raise concerns about the messages, and they went viral in the meantime); lack of engagement with local stakeholders (requests to talk to Facebook’s engineering and data teams about systemic solutions had gone unanswered); and a lack of transparency (seven months after an incident Zuckerberg cited as a success story because Facebook had blocked a series of messages inciting specific violence, the organizations still did not know the details of what had happened). The overall picture that these facts paint is that Facebook’s role as an instrument in ethnic violence in Myanmar is a recurrent and systemic problem, and one which the company has been (or should have been) aware of for years. A Lacuna in the Law Despite this background, Facebook has few binding legal obligations and the relevant legal frameworks are weak. First, and most obviously, Facebook must comply with the local laws of jurisdictions in which it operates. However, the government of Myanmar has shown little appetite for placing political or legal pressure on Facebook to improve its operations, instead downplaying the level of violence altogether. The government has consistently denied claims that genocide or ethnic cleansing are occurring, claiming that the Rohingya are burning their own villages. Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader—and the recipient of a Nobel