Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020)
Crime as Cognitive Constraint
The point remains that the FFM found that Facebook had a crucial
role to play. 234 Facebook as a company did ignore Myanmar civil
society’s calls to pay more attention to the prevalence of hate speech
on the platform in the years preceding the 2016 and 2017 outbreaks of
violence. Facebook commissioned a human rights impact assessment
only in 2018, years after market entry and after it had wreaked havoc
in the country. It was only in 2018 when Myanmar-specific
improvements noticeably surfaced on the platform, including hiring
more Myanmar-fluent human content reviewers and forming a
Myanmar team. 235 No early warning signs or emergency escalation
mechanisms appear to have been set up early on, as Myanmar civil
society lamented. 236 Facebook’s content moderation pre-2018 revealed
a poor understanding of the socio-political context of Myanmar,
particularly the state’s longstanding persecution of ethnic minorities.237
These circumstances show that corporations may be involved in mass
atrocity crimes in different ways, and criminal law may not always have
the words for all modalities of corporate transgression.
IV. The Promise of Tort
The usefulness of tort to accommodate new modalities of harm,
especially as a response to technology, is not new. In their seminal
article arguing for a right to privacy, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D.
Brandeis justified the development of a right to privacy as an actionable
tort under US law due to intrusions into personal space facilitated by
technology. 238 In a similar manner, as technology refines corporate
involvement in mass atrocity crimes, this article aims to develop a tort
234. Detailed Findings of the FFM, supra note 7, ¶ 1347.
235. See Sara Su, Update on Myanmar, FACEBOOK (Aug. 15, 2018),
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/update-on-myanmar/
[https://perma.cc/Z7SW-KEQJ]; Removing Myanmar Military Officials
(Aug.
28,
2018),
from
Facebook,
FACEBOOK
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/removing-myanmar-officials/
[https://perma.cc/4VQZ-UQCD]; Product Policy Forum Minutes,
(Nov.
15,
2018),
FACEBOOK
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/content-standards-forumminutes/ [https://perma.cc/4CZG-MR36].
236. See Euan McKirdy, Facebook: We Didn’t Do Enough to Prevent
Myanmar
Violence, CNN BUSINESS (Nov. 6, 2018 11:49
AM), https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/tech/facebook-myanmarreport/index.html [https://perma.cc/K27C-J8MN].
237. See Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Overreacting to Failure’: Facebook’s New
Myanmar Strategy Baffles Local Activists, THE GUARDIAN (Feb. 7, 2019),
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/07/facebookmyanmar-genocide-violence-hate-speech [https://perma.cc/MM62-JHL2].
238. See Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4
HARV. L. REV. 193, 195 (1890).
183