Dublin office.166 Research conducted by Amnesty International provides further evidence of the inadequacy of Meta’s staffing of its Myanmar content team during the Rakhine crisis. Amnesty International interviewed six Rohingya refugees who recalled how they tried to ‘report’ anti-Rohingya content on Facebook before and during the 2017 atrocities, only for their reports to either be ignored or to be told that the content did not violate Facebook’s community standards.167 Sharif, a 28-year-old Rohingya community educator, told Amnesty International that he reported antiRohingya content “more than 100 times” since 2014, and no action was ever taken.168 Showkutara had a similar experience, and recalled her dismay at Meta’s repeated failure to take action in response to her reports: “There were so many pages and contents, how could I report them all? I was not able to do anything against all these things. But I did report some, and I just received a message [that no action would be taken]… I really wanted to stop these things on Facebook, and I tried a lot – I just cried when I saw this, I didn’t have any other option. I really wanted Facebook to stop this hate speech spreading, but I could not, and it made me so upset.”169 Civil society activists working on digital rights in Myanmar at the time of the 2017 atrocities in northern Rakhine State offered a similar account. Victoire Rio, who headed social impact for the Phandeeyar foundation – a technology and innovation hub – at the time, recounted discussing the inadequacies of Meta’s content moderation in a meeting with a delegation of Meta staff to Myanmar in June 2017: “I raised the fact that we needed a much better escalation mechanism to address emergencies, and that the reporting system was not working. I was told that the on-platform report function was the fastest way to get something reviewed, even in emergencies. I was told this took six hours on average – and I laughed out loud at the guy, as my experience was that the reports took far longer to receive a response, if they ever got one at all, and the response received was typically ‘this is not a violation of community standards’. We actually ran an experiment to test the turnaround time at scale following that meeting, and found that the large majority of the content, if it ever was reviewed, took over 48 hours to get a response. In many cases, the response came within minutes of 48 hours, suggesting that was likely Facebook’s internal target. But a post could go very viral within 48 hours.”170 In 2018 group of civil society activists wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg about viral chain messages which had been circulated via Facebook Messenger and which sought to stoke violence between Buddhists and Muslims. The letter described these messages as “clear examples of your tools being used to incite real harm” and complained that “far from being stopped, they spread in an unprecedented way, reaching country-wide and causing widespread fear and at least three violent incidents in the process.”171 Even after Meta’s role in respect of the violence in Rakhine state had received global attention, Meta’s response remained wholly inadequate. An August 2018 analysis of over 1,000 Facebook posts by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley revealed that, one year after the peak of the violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, Meta had done little to address the huge amount of harmful anti-Rohingya content on the platform.172 Meta’s failures in respect of content moderation were also the focus of significant criticism from the IIFFMM. In its final report, the IIFFMM (or “the Mission”) noted, “[a]lthough improved in recent months, the response Referenced in Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, and confirmed by an Amnesty International interview with one activist who was in the Facebook group. 166 Amnesty International interview by video call with Maung Sawyeddollah, 6 April 2022; Amnesty International interview by video call with Tun (pseudonym), 11 April 2022; Amnesty International interview by video call with Mohammed Junaid, 18 April 2022; Amnesty International video call with Mohammed Showife, 12 April 2022; Amnesty International interview by video call with Showkutara, 6 April 2022. 167 168 Amnesty International Interview with Mohamed Sharif (pseudonym), 13 April 2022. 169 Amnesty International interview by video call with Showkutara, 06 April 2022. 170 Amnesty International interview by video call with Victoire Rio, 12 April 2022. Civil Society Open Letter to Facebook, Yangon Myanmar, 5 April 2018, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rs02G96Y9w5dpX0Vf1LjWp6B9mp32VY-/view 171 Reuters, “Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar”, 15 August 2018, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/specialreport/myanmar-facebook-hate/ 172 THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 35