and problems that arose were to be understood and resolved later.297 In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg announced a departure from “move fast and break things”.298 However, as recently as 2021 it was reported that: “Every engineer at the company says, ‘This is still our motto.’”299 According to one former Meta employee, the “move fast and break things” slogan was “still used as a holdover in some spaces” within the company.300 Previous investigations into Meta’s internal culture portray a culture which incentivized and rewarded highrisk behaviours, 301 while staff who sought to raise the alarm about human rights risks, and address them, were faced with major structural barriers. 302 Meta’s propensity for human rights risk and its consistent failure to proactively address its responsibilities represent the symptoms of a business model which inherently conflicts with international human rights standards. As Amnesty International has previously reported, Meta’s business model is predicated on targeted advertising enabled by the extraction and accumulation of vast amounts of data about people. To increase its revenue from advertisers, Meta needs to continuously expand its data vault and refine its predictive algorithms to maximize engagement.303 In September 2021, when Meta recognized the failings of its prior approach to “innovating” (grounded in the “move fast and break things” motto) following the publication of the Facebook Papers, the company also claimed: “… but we have fundamentally changed that approach. Today, we embed teams focusing specifically on safety and security issues directly into product development teams, allowing us to address these issues during our product development process, not after it. Products also have to go through an Integrity Review process, similar to the Privacy Review process, so we can anticipate potential abuses and build in ways to mitigate them.” 304 Meta’s original “move fast and break things” motto entailed clear tensions with the company’s responsibility to undertake proactive and comprehensive human rights due diligence in respect of all of its business activities. Meta’s recent statements claiming that is has adopted a “fundamentally changed” approach to “safety and security issues” did not explicitly refer to the role of human rights due diligence. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, this change of approach will have on Meta’s human rights footprint. And even if it does entail substantive improvements, for many affected communities across the world – including the Rohingya – the changes have come far too late. On 20 May 2022, Amnesty International wrote to Meta and asked what measures the company took prior to 2017 to prevent its algorithmic systems from being used to amplify advocacy of hatred against the Rohingya. Meta responded that “Meta’s investments in Myanmar in response to the events in 2017 have been significant”, but added that the company could not provide information concerning the period leading up to 2017 because the company is “currently engaged in litigation proceedings in relation to related matters”. 305 In March 2021, Meta adopted a human rights policy for the first time.306 In the policy, the company Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, 2017. 297 Wired, “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Future From Virtual Reality to Anonymity”, 30 April 2014, wired.com/2014/04/zuckerberg-f8interview. Zuckerberg described the rationale for the change in approach and motto as: “[so that] people can rely on us as a critical infrastructure for building all of their apps across every mobile platform”. 298 299 300 Forcepoint, F**k It, Ship It! With Sheera Frenkel, 7 September 2021, forcepoint.com/resources/podcast/f--k-it-ship-it-sheera-frenkel Interview by video call with a former Meta employee, 27 April 2022. See, for example: Karen Hao, “How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation“, MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021 technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation; WSJ: “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive”, 26 May 2020, wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions11590507499 301 Julia Carrie Wong, “The Facebook Loophole: How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account”, The Guardian, 12 April 2021 theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang 302 Amnesty International, Surveillance Giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights (Index: POL 30/1404/2019), 21 November 2019, amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/1404/2019/en, p. 12 303 Meta, “Our Progress Addressing Challenges and Innovating Responsibly”, 21 September 2021, about.fb.com/news/2021/09/ourprogress-addressing-challenges-and-innovating-responsibly 304 305 Meta, Letter to Amnesty International, 31 May 2022 (on file with Amnesty International). Meta, “Corporate Human Rights Policy, 16 March 2021, about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Facebooks-Corporate-HumanRights-Policy.pdf 306 THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 56