In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.

Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.

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yorwba 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you read contemporary reporting about anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-buddhis... you may learn that there were Buddhist monks traveling the country, giving sermons to crowds of thousands of people, telling them to treat Muslims as enemies, and stickers being used to visibly signal alignment with the movement.

Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.

In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.

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fcarraldo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The internet and the real world don't exist in separate vacuums. Internet communication and amplification of hate speech helped create an environment where hateful sermons were planned and popularized, and vice-versa.

Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.

You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.

	▲	yorwba an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Reach is indeed important. But the internet is not the only way to generate reach, nor necessarily the most effective one. During the riots in 2012 and 2013, 2% of the population were using the internet https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... and there were 14 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?location... Meanwhile, a traveling monk wanting to hold a sermon about the importance of shunning Muslims could rely on the local religious community to deliver him an audience, and on word of mouth, flyers and posters to inform everyone who didn't attend.

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chrisweekly 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good points. Also, thanks for the Reuters link. Buddhists as a group have for centuries been (fairly) associated with peace and nonviolence. The situation in Myanmar is a tragic anomaly. The article you shared sheds at least a bit of light on it:

> Relishing his extremist reputation, Wirathu describes himself as the "Burmese bin Laden."

Wirathu is clearly a sociopath -- and the furthest thing from a real Buddhist. If only people weren't so easily led by those who use religion as a means of control....

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deaux 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Facebook's direct culpability in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar had already been well-known and thoroughly reported on many years before Careless People.

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876433790 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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walrus01 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is from 2016, it's a fairly detailed study of what happens when a rural, barely (or illiterate) population gets access to a powerful social media tool:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...

https://archive.is/NVOwW

	▲	deaux 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Another one, with many links to other reports for those who don't trust it because "Amnesty is biased". https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

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totetsu 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I heard it was because .. in a country where they did tie-ups with mobile operators to 0 rate face book traffic, to make it to the point where the internet and facebook were the same thing to many people, they also only employed a handful of moderators. Meanwhile Politicians were posting incitements to violence on the platform.