5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED Garlick, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific region, whose remit included Myanmar, told the audience that in response to the violence the company planned to speed up translation of the sites’ user guidelines and code of conduct into Burmese. Garlick also explained how content was reviewed after it was flagged by users who found it to be offensive, though it was unclear how many people fluent in Burmese language were doing this work. The Burmese language community standards promised by Garlick, however, would not launch until September 2015, 14 months after she spoke in Yangon. And even now, nearly four years later, Facebook will not reveal exactly how many Burmese speakers are evaluating content that has been flagged as possibly violating its standards. Facebook also had at least two direct warnings before the 2014 riots that hate speech was exploding on the platform and could have real-world consequences. Aela Callan, a foreign correspondent on a fellowship from Stanford University, met with Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications for Facebook, in November 2013 to discuss hate speech and fake user pages that were pervasive in Myanmar. Callan returned to the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters in early March 2014, after follow-up meetings, with an official from a Myanmar tech civil society organization to again raise the issues with the company and show Facebook “how serious it [hate speech and disinformation] was,” Callan says. But Facebook’s sprawling bureaucracy and its excitement over the potential of the the Myanmar market appeared to override concerns about the proliferation of hate speech. At the time, the company had just one Burmese speaker based in Dublin, Ireland, to review Burmese language content flagged as problematic, Callan was told. A spokeswoman for Facebook would say only that the content review team has included Burmese language reviewers since 2013. “It was seen as a connectivity opportunity rather than a big pressing problem,” Callan says. “I think they were more excited about the connectivity opportunity because so many people were using it, rather than the core issues.” Hate speech seemed like a “low priority” for Facebook at the time, she says. Myanmar was a small but unique market for the company, and Facebook has taken a multi-faceted approach in recent years to better serve users, Garlick says. This includes hiring additional Burmese speakers to review content, improving reporting tools, and “developing local and relevant content” to educate users on how to best use the platform. “We have been working over the years to sort of increase our resourcing and the work that we can do to try to reduce misuse and abuse of our platform and to try to drive the benefit that connectivity can have within the country,” she says. To critics of the social media company, the early response to the Mandalay riots were harbingers of the difficulties it would face in Myanmar in the coming years—difficulties that persist to this day: A slow response time to posts violating Facebook’s standards, a barebones staff without the capacity to handle hate speech or understand Myanmar’s cultural nuances, an over-reliance on a small collection of local civil society groups to alert the company to possibly dangerous posts spreading on the platform. All of these reflect a decidedly ad-hoc approach for a multi-billion-dollar tech giant that controls so much of popular discourse in the country and across the world. Today, four years since the riots, Facebook’s role in society is again under intense scrutiny, both in Myanmar and around the world. Myanmar’s military has been accused of rape, arson, and arbitrary https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 5/16