Victoire Rio The Role of Social Media in Fomenting Violence: Myanmar guistic contextual considerations and negatively impacting on freedom of expression. 15 or Insufficient investment into human moderation Not only did Facebook have minimal capacity for automated detection in Burmese language, it also failed to adequately invest in human moderators. According to Reuters, Facebook hired its first moderator for Burmese language content in 2013, a year after concerns over misuse of the platform first made it into the US media. The company then scaled its moderation effort from two to four Burmese content moderators in 2015 to cope with the heightened risks associated with the historic elections taking place that year. Despite the rise in real world violence following the October 2016 and August 2017 attacks in Rakhine state, the company had only “dozens” of reviewers moderating Burmese content by the time Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify in front of the US congress in April 2018. Judging by the company’s recruitment ads at the time, it is also unclear how much linguistic and contextual understanding these reviewers had. The position of Myanmar Market Specialist, for example, had Burmese language skills listed as an ‘ideal’ rather than an ‘essential’ requirement. Meanwhile, outsourced reviewer jobs with companies like CPL, one of Facebook’s contractors at the time, required applicants to be legally authorised to work in Ireland, which severely restricted the pool of candidates and introduced a clear bias towards members of the Myanmar diaspora, who had often left Myanmar while the country was still a military regime and before Facebook became widely available and used. Lack of effective emergency mechanism With Facebook lacking the capacity to self-moderate its platform, it relied extensively on escalations from third parties to address dangerous content and emergencies. In the absence of a formal escalation mechanism, however, these escalations had to be channeled via email or messaging apps to policy staff, who lacked language and context, were not empowered to take action, and worked outside of Myanmar working hours. As a result, emergencies, even when flagged, were often not addressed quickly enough to mitigate their impact. Focus on individual content appeals and PR campaigns rather than structural enforcement solutions Working through the policy team also presented major limitations as policy staff were neither trained nor empowered to identify and address systemic flaws with the product and its inner workings. As a result, most of Facebook’s response to the deteriorating situation in Myanmar focused on developing, or commissioning, communication materials and on addressing case by case appeals. These solutions placed the bulk of the responsibility on Myanmar users and civil society and did little to address the root causes of the problem, which lay in the systematic abuse and weaponisation of the platform by coordinated actors.