3/30/22, 11:08 PM Facebook’s role in Myanmar and Ethiopia under new scrutiny | Facebook | The Guardian rights group Global Witness found that Facebook’s algorithm was promoting posts in breach of its own policies that incited violence against protesters marching against the coup launched by the military in February. Researchers began by liking a Myanmar military fan page, which was not seen to be violating Facebook’s terms. They found that Facebook then suggested several promilitary pages that did contain abusive content. “We didn’t have to look hard to find this content; FB’s algorithm led us to it,” said Rosie Sharpe, a digital researcher who worked on the report. “Of the first five pages they recommended, three of them contained content that broke FB’s rules by, for example, inciting or glorifying violence.” The link between social media posts and offline violence in Myanmar had already been widely documented. In 2018 a Guardian analysis revealed that hate speech exploded on Facebook at the start of the Rohingya crisis the year before, when attacks by armed groups and ordinary communities on people from the Muslim minority erupted. Thousands of posts by nationalist, anti-Rohingya supporters gained traction online, including posts which falsely claimed mosques were stockpiling weapons. An independent investigation commissioned by Facebook later agreed with assessments that the site had been used to incite offline violence. “What happens on Facebook matters,” Sharpe said. “Promotion of violence online leads to real-world harms. That’s particularly true in Myanmar, where Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the military’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya.” Facebook has faced similar criticism in Ethiopia, which has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). In 2019, for instance, the retired Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie blamed “fake news” being shared on Facebook for violence that left 81 people dead in Oromia region. After another outbreak of ethnic violence in 2020 – sparked by the killing of a popular singer from the Oromo ethnic group – an investigation by Vice claimed that the violence had been “supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people’s anger”. In her testimony Haugen blamed engagement-based ranking for “literally fanning ethnic violence” in countries like Ethiopia. “Facebook … knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks-role-in-myanmar-and-ethiopia-under-new-scrutiny 2/4