Remember how I said that the @Facebook scandal would just keep getting worse?
When I worked for Snopes, I brought this up time and again to Facebook because I saw it and was tracking it, as human migration is a major interest of mine (I've done a lot of work around refugees and asylum-seekers in the past) and it was on my radar. I saw quickly how bad the
language and narratives around the #Rohingya were getting, and I also knew - since I have expertise in this topic - how destructive disinformation can be. So I brought it up to them in meeting after meeting, since at that point I was leading my org's partnership with them. I was
repeatedly ignored; my concerns were downplayed; my efforts to call attention to the displacement and genocide about to happen or in the process of happening were hand-waved away. Nothing happened. I wrote about it on here, I pushed reports at them, I begged them to do something
Now, it's looking more as though my initial instincts were correct: I theorized then, as now, that the network was selling psychographically-targeted ad packages to corrupt political parties and regimes, and telling themselves that tech is morally neutral, so it was okay.
I don't know if that was the actual thought process, because I got pushed out of all the meetings after a while. My old boss took them over and I heard no more about Myanmar from that side of things.
Now there are hundreds of thousands dead or displaced and two Reuters journalists remain in prison for investigating exactly this.
