of Facebook has been slow and ineffective”.173 The Mission detailed its own struggles to seek an appropriate response from Meta after witnesses it engaged with faced death threats on Facebook due to their cooperation with the Mission. The relevant extract is contained in full below: “The Mission itself experienced a slow and ineffective response from Facebook when it used the standard reporting mechanism to alert the company to a post targeting a human rights defender for his alleged cooperation with the Mission. The post described the individual as a “national traitor”, consistently adding the adjective “Muslim”. It was shared and re-posted over 1,000 times. Numerous comments to the post explicitly called for the person to be killed, in unequivocal terms: “Beggar-dog species. As long as we are feeling sorry for them, our country is not at peace. These dogs need to be completely removed.” “If this animal is still around, find him and kill him. There needs to be government officials in NGOs.” “Wherever they are, Muslim animals don’t know to be faithful to the country.” “He is a Muslim. Muslims are dogs and need to be shot.” “Don't leave him alive. Remove his whole race. Time is ticking.” The Mission reported this post to Facebook on four occasions; in each instance the response received was that the post was examined but “doesn’t go against one of [Facebook’s] specific Community Standards”. The Mission subsequently sent a message to an official Facebook email account about the matter but did not receive a response. The post was finally removed several weeks later but only through the support of a contact at Facebook, not through the official channel. Several months later, however, the Mission found at least 16 re-posts of the original post still circulating on Facebook. In the weeks and months after the post went online, the human rights defender received multiple death threats from Facebook users, warnings from neighbours, friends, taxi drivers and other contacts that they had seen his photo and the posts on Facebook, and strong suggestions that the post was an early warning. His family members were also threatened. The Mission has seen many similar cases where individuals, usually human rights defenders or journalists, become the target of an online hate campaign that incites or threatens violence.’ 174 In several ways, the IIFFMM’s experience is emblematic of Meta’s failures in respect of content moderation in Myanmar before, during, and even after the 2017 atrocities. The fact that the same UN mission which was known to be investigating Meta’s role in a possible genocide could not succeed in their repeated efforts to have content removed – even though the content clearly incited violence and discrimination against the Rohingya – speaks volumes about the extent of the company’s failings. As the Mission sought in vain to report the offending post and have it taken down, the post had already gone viral and rapidly spread on the Facebook platform. This dynamic speaks to the inherent limitations of content moderation – even when it is better resourced – as a solution to the rapid spread of harmful content at scale on social media platforms, which is often boosted by the content-shaping algorithms underpinning the platforms themselves. This limitation is analysed in detail in Section 6.1, below. Sawyeddollah, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee and youth activist, recalled how his frustrations at Meta’s content moderation failures led him to believe that Meta itself was also contributing to the suffering of his community: “I saw a lot of horrible things on Facebook. And I just thought that the people who posted that were bad. I didn’t think that Facebook was to blame. But one day I saw a post that made me feel so bad. It said, ‘these Bengali people’ - using derogatory words - ‘their birth rate is so much higher than us – if they live on, we will be under their rule soon’. I tried to report that post to Facebook. I said it was hate speech. But I got a response that said thank you for reporting it, but sorry, it does not go against community standards. That made me really angry. Then I realized that it is not only these people – the posters – but Facebook is also responsible. Facebook is helping them by not taking care of their platform.”175 After the 2014 Mandalay riots triggered the Myanmar authorities to temporarily block Facebook in 2014, the company moved to support a civil society-led, anti-hate-speech initiative known as ‘Panzagar’ or ‘flower speech’ by releasing a ‘flower speech sticker pack’.176 The idea of the initiative was to enable users to post 173 IIFFMM, “Final Report”, para 74. 174 IIFFMM, “Detailed findings”, para. 1351. 175 Amnesty International interview by video call with Sawyeddollah, 06 April 2022. 176 See: “Support Panzagar: End Hate Speech with Flower Speech”, Facebook Page, facebook.com/supportflowerspeech THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 36