Facebook commissioned a human rights assessment of its role in Myanmar, where everyone from UN officials to civil society groups have criticized it for doing little to moderate content that incited violence & hate against Rohingya Muslims. A few thoughts newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/m…
1) This assessment comes after years of public and private pressure from civil society groups in Myanmar, who have, in some cases, put their own safety at risk to flag problematic content to Facebook (that the company's own content moderators should be catching)
2) Most news coverage has led with Facebook admitting it should have done more to prevent/halt violence— this is noteworthy but not necessarily new, Facebook's line has been that it was too slow to act during the Rohingya crisis for several months now.
3) Facebook still has no apparent plans to station personnel in Myanmar, which has been a longtime ask from civil society groups. From the company's perspective this could put personnel + data at risk, but they sacrifice access to moderators w deep linguistic/cultural knowledge.
4) Facebook says it's preserving content it's taken down for "relevant authorities" to use in investigating human rights violations. This is important considering the ICC investigation into the crisis. But is this Myanmar specific? ...
... What about places like Syria & Iraq where investigators depend heavily on evidence posted on social media to document atrocities? How will Facebook make these calls/which countries & jurisdictions?
5) Perhaps most important – Links between social media and communal violence aren't specific to Myanmar. Myanmar has gotten most attention because 1) Facebook is essentially the internet there 2) because of the scale of the atrocities last year 3) statements by UN officials ...
.... are we going to get this level of transparency/a human rights assessment for places like Sri Lanka and South Sudan, which have faced similar problems with a much more muted response from the company? Each country is different.
Sustained transparency would mean publishing more information about the company's relationships with governments, take-down requests, and about resources put toward enforcement of its community standards across countries. I'll stop here.
