Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.

The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.

Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.

If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.

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slibhb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"We shouldn't give Burma the internet because they might commit a genocide"

Do you hear yourself? Let's not give them electricity and fossil fuels either. Just keep them in dark age conditions so they don't hurt anyone.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

> Do you hear yourself?

Better than you heard me, given that's not what I said.

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solid_fuel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is an uphill battle, I'm afraid. As evidenced from their other comments, slibhb struggles a lot with basic moral concepts like "you are responsible for the things you do".

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slibhb an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's very fashionable for Westerners to evince belief in the idea that inhabitants of third-world countries have no free will and aren't responsible for their actions. We're told that everything bad that happens in those countries is due to large Western companies or a history of colonization.

This is all very silly. The genocide in Myanmar (it's a civil war last I checked) isn't Facebook's fault (legally or morally). Facebook has surely made mistakes, but that doesn't make them to blame for people killing each other on the other side of the world.

	▲	ben_w 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're still shadow-boxing with what you want me to have written, not what I actually wrote.