5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED officer, was described as “problematic,” according to the person with knowledge of the company’s work in Myanmar. Zaw Htay did not respond to requests for comment about his controversial posts. Facebook’s policy toward prohibited content applies to all users, including government officials, Garlick says. T H E CO N T I N U E D F R U S T R AT I O N S faced by civil society groups, tech organizations, and those at the receiving end of harassment on Facebook burst into public view this spring in the wake of an incident involving the detection and removal of yet more disinformation. During an interview with the website Vox in early April, Zuckerberg claimed the the company had found chain letters that were widely shared across the country on Facebook messenger starting in early September. One message warned Buddhist groups about an imminent attack by Muslims on September 11. The the other warned of violence from Buddhist nationalists toward Muslims on the same date. In Zuckerberg’s retelling of events, he got a call on a Saturday morning that there were messages stoking violence spreading through Facebook Messenger. “Now, in that case, our systems detect that that’s going on. We stop those messages from going through,” he said. Civil society groups were caught off guard and angered by Zuckerberg’s characterization that Facebook’s systems had detected the messages, which differed greatly from theirs. See What’s Next in Tech With the Fast Forward Newsletter From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to transformed cities and new startups, sign up for the latest news. Your email Enter your email SUBMIT By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from WIRED. You can unsubscribe at any time. In reality, they say, it was their members who had found the messages, alerted Facebook, and waited days for a response. The messages, the groups say, lead to at least three violent incidents, including the attempted torching of an Islamic school and the ransacking of shops and houses belonging to Muslims in a town in central Myanmar. A group of six civil society organizations said in a scathing open letter to Zuckerberg that the messenger incident showed an “over-reliance on third parties, a lack of a proper mechanism for emergency escalation, a reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic solutions, and a lack of transparency.” Zuckerberg later apologized by email for “not being sufficiently clear” about the role that civil society groups play in monitoring content, according to a copy of the email published by the New York Times. He added the company has hired “dozens more Burmese language reviewers,” a refrain that has become so common it is now a running joke in Myanmar tech circles. https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 14/16