{"id":3895,"date":"2018-04-05T13:22:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T06:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/new-eng\/?p=3895"},"modified":"2026-01-28T10:59:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T04:29:15","slug":"myanmar-groups-slam-facebook-ceo-for-downplaying-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/?p=3895","title":{"rendered":"Myanmar Groups Slam Facebook CEO for Downplaying Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a Thursday\u00a0letter<\/a>, they slammed the Facebook CEO for a Vox Media\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0in which they believe Zuckerberg glossed over Facebook\u2019s problems in the country. Zuckerberg claimed his company stopped attempts to incite violence between Myanmar\u2019s Muslim and Buddhist groups over Facebook Messenger.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur systems detect that that\u2019s going on. We stop those messages from going through,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n

Groups in Myanmar, however, claim Facebook failed to quickly notice the problem last September, when the incident occurred. At the time, bad actors encouraged violence over Facebook Messenger with content that circulated for more than four days, possibly reaching hundreds of thousands of people.<\/p>\n

\"FB<\/a><\/p>\n

Only when the civil society groups alerted Facebook about the abuse did the social media giant intervene, their letter says. \u201cIn your interview, you refer to your detection \u2018systems.\u2019 We believe your system, in this case, was us \u2014and we were far from systematic,\u201d the letter adds.<\/p>\n

Although Facebook eventually stopped the abuse, by then the offending messages had caused widespread fear and at least three violent incidents, according to the groups. Making matters worse is that Facebook is ill-equipped to stop future attempts to incite violence over the platform, they add.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as we know, there are no Burmese-speaking Facebook staff to whom Myanmar monitors can directly raise such cases,\u201d their letter reads. \u201cWe were lucky to have a confident English speaker who was connected enough to escalate the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a million Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar over the violence, which intensified last August in a military crackdown that the US\u00a0condemned<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cethnic cleansing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to Thursday\u2019s letter, Facebook is apologizing. \u201cWe are sorry that Mark did not make clearer that it was the civil society groups in Myanmar who first reported these messages,\u201d the company said in an email \u201cWe took their reports very seriously and immediately investigated ways to help prevent the spread of this content.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spotlight on Facebook\u2019s troubles in Myanmar comes as United Nations officials also claim the platform is fanning violence in the country. \u201cHate speech and incitement to violence on social media is rampant, particularly on Facebook,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0UN human rights investigator Marzuki Darusman last month. \u201cTo a large extent, it goes unchecked.\u201d<\/p>\n

One Facebook executive also\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0his teams are losing sleep over the issue. However, Facebook is trying to solve the problems. \u201cWe should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content,\u201d the company added in its email.<\/p>\n

The civil society groups in Myanmar say they want to work with Facebook to crack down on the abuse. But so far, they\u2019ve only engaged with Facebook\u2019s policy team, and not the product or engineering divisions. Attempts at greater collaboration have also gone unanswered, they claim.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe risk of Facebook content sparking open violence is arguably nowhere higher right now than in Myanmar,\u201d their letter adds.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The letter comes from six groups, including the IT innovation lab\u00a0Phandeeyar<\/a>, the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, Burma Monitor, the Center for Social Integrity, Equality Myanmar, and Myanmar Human Rights Educator Network.<\/p>\n

Facebook said it plans to work with the groups. The company is also rolling out a new function to report abuse on Messenger, and has added more Burmese language reviewers to its content moderation efforts.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a Thursday\u00a0letter, they slammed the Facebook CEO for a Vox Media\u00a0interview\u00a0in which they believe Zuckerberg glossed over Facebook\u2019s problems in the country. Zuckerberg claimed his company stopped attempts to incite violence between Myanmar\u2019s Muslim and Buddhist groups over Facebook Messenger. \u201cOur systems detect that that\u2019s going on. We stop those messages from going through,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3897,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895\/revisions\/3897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}