“I really believe that we deserve a remedy from Facebook. I believe that we are living in this hell because of many different [actors], including Facebook… Facebook cannot remake our lives as before; only we can do that. But what we need is education to do it. Facebook has billions of dollars. We are just asking for a little to give opportunities to Rohingya students in these [refugee] camps.” This report outlines in detail how Meta – through its dangerous algorithms and its relentless pursuit of profit – substantially contributed to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya. It reveals that Meta’s contribution was not merely that of a passive and neutral platform that responded inadequately in the face of an unprecedented crisis. In reality, Meta’s content-shaping algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya. Ultimately, this happened because Meta’s business model, based on invasive profiling and targeted advertising, fuels the spread of harmful content, including incitement to violence. The algorithmic systems that shape a user’s experience on Facebook and determine what information they see are designed to keep people on the platform – the more engaged users are, the more advertising revenue Meta earns. As a result, these systems prioritize the most inflammatory, divisive, and harmful content as this content is more likely to maximize engagement. In a typical example of the anti-Rohingya content which proliferated on Facebook at the time, one Facebook post criticizing a human rights defender for his alleged cooperation with the IIFFMM labelled the individual a “national traitor” and consistently added the adjective “Muslim”. The post was shared over 1,000 times and sparked numerous comments calling for the person to be killed, including: “Muslims are dogs and need to be shot.” “Don't leave him alive. Remove his whole race. Time is ticking.” The IIFFMM itself repeatedly tried to report the post to Meta, subsequently describing the company’s response as “slow and ineffective”. This incitement to hatred, violence and discrimination went to the very top of Myanmar’s military leadership. The leader of Myanmar’s military, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, posted on his Facebook page on 1 September 2017, saying, “We openly declare that absolutely, our country has no Rohingya race”. Meta finally banned Min Aung Hlaing from Facebook in 2018. He went on to seize power from the civilian government in a coup in February 2021, assuming the role of Chairman of the State Administration Council. As the prospect of mass violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar grew, local civil society activists repeatedly pleaded with Meta to act. This report documents in detail the repeated communications and interventions received by Meta between 2012 and 2017, including multiple trips by activists to Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, USA, during which the company was explicitly warned that it risked contributing to a genocide. Despite these efforts, Meta failed to heed the warnings. Inside Myanmar, many Rohingya tried to report anti-Rohingya content via Facebook’s ‘report’ function. However, the company repeatedly failed to enforce its own content policies on removing “hate speech”, allowing these hateful narratives to proliferate and reach unprecedented audiences in Myanmar. Meta’s wholly inadequate staffing of its Myanmar operations prior to 2017 was a significant factor in the company’s staggering failures to remove harmful anti-Rohingya content from the Facebook platform. This is symptomatic of the company’s broader failure to adequately invest in content moderation across the Global South. In mid-2014, Meta staff admitted that they only had one single Burmese-speaking content moderator devoted to Myanmar at the time, based in their Dublin office. Meta has never disclosed the precise number of Burmese-language content moderators it employed during the 2017 atrocities, but the company claimed to have hired ‘dozens’ more in mid-2018. THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 7