And so, I said very clearly to them that Facebook runs the risk of being in Myanmar what radios were in Rwanda. I said that very clearly; I said it very explicitly. It wasn’t the last time that I said it. I said it on many occasions after that. But I think that was the first time that I had said it to them.”277 In September 2015, a senior Meta representative travelled to Myanmar to launch the Burmese-language version of Facebook’s Community Standards. During a meeting between the Meta representative and a range of local civil society groups, several groups raised concerns that Facebook’s community standards were not being adequately enforced in the country.278 In 2016, serious violence erupted in Northern Rakhine state as the Myanmar security forces engaged in a brutal crackdown against the Rohingya population after the ARSA militant group attacked border posts. The violence foreshadowed the events to come in 2017.279 A senior Meta representative made at least three visits to Myanmar in 2016. In one meeting in November 2016 between the Meta representative and a local digital rights activist, the local activist delivered a “stark warning” about the risks that Meta could contribute to mass violence in Myanmar.280 In January 2017, David Madden and Victoire Rio remotely joined a meeting between Meta representatives and another digital rights activist taking place in Menlo Park.281 David Madden recounted the briefing to PBS Frontline: “We were genuinely worried about where things might go from there, and the situation on Facebook was even worse because what was really apparent by now was just how rife the hate speech problem was, and importantly, just how inadequate Facebook's response was. So we were very clear at that meeting that their systems just didn’t work. The processes that they had in place to try to identify and pull down problematic content, they just weren't working. And we were deeply concerned about where this was going to go, and the possibility that something even worse was going to happen imminently... So we were very prescriptive and very clear at that meeting. At that meeting I reiterated this point that there was a real risk that Facebook would be in Myanmar what the radios had been in Rwanda, and I was really clear about that.”282 In June 2017, a Meta delegation travelled to Myanmar and met with local digital rights groups including Phandeeyar and the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO). Victoire Rio, who attended two meetings with Meta staff during that trip, told Amnesty International that she “raised the fact that we needed a much better escalation mechanism, and that policies really needed to be contextualized to account for risks”.283 Htaike Htaike Aung is a prominent Myanmar digital rights activist who repeatedly intervened to warn Meta of escalating risks ahead of the 2017 atrocities in northern Rakhine State. She shared her views on the company’s response to these warnings: “We warned them at every opportunity we had. They didn't care. They ignored us for a long time and then just focused on PR solutions. They seemed to care more about their own reputational risk than they really did about addressing the problems.”284 Despite receiving these repeated direct warnings and pleas for action, Meta failed, again and again, to take action which could have mitigated its adverse human rights impacts in Myanmar, as detailed further in Section 8.2 below. 277 PBS Frontline, The Facebook Dilemma, 19 June 2018, pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/david-madden Briefing deck by Victoire Rio and Htaike Htaike Aung, 13 June 2022. Upcoming release on Myanmar Internet Project, myanmarinternet.info. 278 See: Amnesty International, ‘“We are at breaking point” Rohingya: persecuted in Myanmar, neglected in Bangladesh’, 2016, ASA 16/5362/2016, 19 December 2016, amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5362/2016/en 279 280 Interview by voice call with Victoire Rio, 13 June 2022. 281 Interview by voice call with Victoire Rio, 13 June 2022. 282 PBS Frontline, The Facebook Dilemma, 19 June 2018, pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/david-madden 283 Interview by video call with Victoire Rio, 12 April 2022. 284 Interview by audio call with Htaike Htaike Aung, 02 September 2022. THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 53