Victoire Rio The Role of Social Media in Fomenting Violence: Myanmar 19  Social media companies should invest significantly more resources towards the detection and investigation of coordinated inauthentic behaviour. They should drastically expand their investigation teams and prioritise the development of detection systems, which can help trigger such investigations.  Social media companies should consider expanding their security bounty model to encompass the detection of information operations and new means of weaponising their platform. 6. Preserve evidence of abuse Although the existence of coordinated efforts to weaponise the Facebook platform for political ends in Myanmar is now widely accepted, the ability of independent researchers and accountability bodies to understand the full scope and scale of the operations is heavily constrained by the continuous and ongoing removal of assets and content by Facebook and the actors themselves.  Social Media companies should consider retaining all content removed for policy violations for a period of at least two years.  Social Media companies should further consider making available to researchers and accountability bodies all public assets such as accounts, pages, and groups identified as being part of a coordinated inauthentic behaviour operation – including the content which had been previously removed for other policy violations. To Civil Society: 1. Look into enforcement and not just policy A lot of civil society criticism of social media to date has focused on questions of policy and bias, i.e. Where should the line between hate speech and freedom of expression fall? To what extent are Facebook’s decision driven by its moderators? Though these are definitely areas that require attention, it is important for civil society to also pay attention to how platforms such as Facebook enforce their policies and whether their enforcement capacity is where it should. Civil society’s experience in Myanmar has shown that enforcement capacity varies significantly from country to country and language to language. For languages where Facebook has no text-based AI classifiers, for example, enforcement relies almost exclusively on user and civil society reports to the company. That is a huge limitation. There can also be flaws in the triaging of these reports and not always sufficient language-specific human capacity to review them, which can result in widespread enforcement errors.  Civil society should advocate for improvements to enforcement, both in terms of resourcing and accuracy.  Civil society should also keep in mind that social media platforms, at their core, are little more than a combination of databases, workflows and algorithms. As with any system, bugs can and do happen, particularly as changes keep getting introduced. Civil society should develop a basic technical understanding of the systems to be able to actively probe them and study errors which may be rooted in technical issues.