{"id":281976,"date":"2021-06-23T19:25:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T16:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/facebook-amplified-myanmar-military-propaganda\/"},"modified":"2021-06-23T19:25:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T16:25:11","slug":"facebook-amplified-myanmar-military-propaganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/facebook-amplified-myanmar-military-propaganda\/","title":{"rendered":"#Facebook amplified Myanmar military propaganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Facebook<\/a> amplified Myanmar military propaganda<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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Facebook\u2019s recommendation algorithm amplifies military propaganda and other material that breaches the company\u2019s own policies in Myanmar following a military takeover in February, a new report by the rights group Global Witness says.<\/p>\n

A month after the military seized power in Myanmar and imprisoned elected leaders, Facebook\u2019s algorithms were still prompting users to view and \u201clike\u201d pro-military pages with posts that incited and threatened violence, pushed misinformation that could lead to physical harm, praised the military and glorified its abuses, Global Witness said in the report, published late Tuesday.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s even though the social media giant vowed to remove such content following the coup,\u00a0announcing\u00a0<\/a>it would remove Myanmar military and military-controlled pages from its site and from Instagram, which it also owns. It has since enacted other measures intended to reduce offline harm in the country<\/p>\n

Facebook said Tuesday its teams \u201ccontinue to closely monitor the situation in Myanmar in real-time and take action on any posts, Pages or Groups that break our rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Days after the Feb. 1 coup, the military temporarily blocked access to Facebook because it was being used to share anti-coup comments and organize protests. Access was later restored. In the following weeks, Facebook continued to tighten its policies against the military, banning all military entities from its platforms and saying it would remove praise or support for violence against citizens and their arrest.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce again, Facebook shows that it\u2019s good at making broad sweeping announcements and bad at actually enforcing them. They\u2019ve had years to improve their work in Myanmar but once again they are still failing,\u201d said Sophie Zhang, a\u00a0former Facebook data scientist<\/a>\u00a0and whistleblower who found evidence of political manipulation in countries such as Honduras and Azerbaijan while she worked there.<\/p>\n

The struggle between the military regime that deposed Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s elected government and those opposing it has sharpened in recent months.<\/p>\n

Soldiers and police have killed hundreds of protesters. Last week, the United Nations\u2019 office in Myanmar\u00a0expressed concern<\/a>\u00a0about escalating human rights abuses after reports that a group opposed to the junta may have executed 25 civilians it captured and allegations that troops had burned down a village.<\/p>\n

\"In
In this March 27, 2021, file photo, an anti-coup protester stands near a fire during a demonstration in Yangon, Myanmar. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Myanmar, also known as Burma, had over 22.3 million Facebook users in January 2020, more than 40 percent of its population, according to social media management platform NapoleonCat.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happ<\/a>ens on Facebook matters everywhere, but in Myanmar that is doubly true,\u201d the report says. As in many countries outside the Western Hemisphere, mobile phones in Myanmar often come pre-loaded with Facebook and many businesses do not have a website, only a Facebook page. For many people in the country, Facebook effectively is the internet.<\/p>\n

On March 23, just before the\u00a0peak of military violence<\/a>\u00a0against civilians, Global Witness said it set up a new, clean Facebook account with no history of liking or following specific topics and searched for \u201cTatmadaw\u201d, the Burmese name for the armed forces. It filtered the search results to show pages and selected the top result \u2014 a military fan page whose name translates as \u201ca gathering of military lovers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Older posts on this page showed sympathy for Myanmar\u2019s soldiers and at least two advertised for young people to join the military \u2014 but none of the newer posts since the coup violated Facebook\u2019s policies. However, when Global Witness\u2019s account \u201cliked\u201d the page, Facebook began recommending related pages with material inciting violence, false claims of interference in last year\u2019s election and support of violence against civilians.<\/p>\n

A March 1 post, for instance, includes a death threat against protesters who vandalize surveillance cameras.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who threaten female police officers from the traffic control office and violently destroy the glass and destroy CCTV, those who cut the cables, those who vandalize with color sprays, (we) have been given an order to shoot to kill them on the spot,\u201d reads part of the post in translation, according to the report. \u201cSaying this before Tatmadaw starts doing this. If you don\u2019t believe and continue to do this, go ahead. If you are not afraid to die, keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook said its ban of the Tatmadaw and other measures have \u201cmade it harder for people to misuse our services to spread harm. This is a highly adversarial issue and we continue to take action on content that violates our policies to help keep people safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Global Witness said its findings show that Facebook fails to uphold the \u201cvery basics\u201d of its own guidelines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe platform operates too much like a walled garden, its algorithms are designed, trained and tweaked without adequate oversight or regulation,\u201d said Naomi Hirst, head of the digital threats campaign at Global Witness. \u201cThis secrecy has to end, Facebook must be made accountable.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Facebook amplified Myanmar military propaganda” Facebook\u2019s recommendation algorithm amplifies military propaganda and other material that breaches the company\u2019s own policies in Myanmar following a military takeover in February, a new report by the rights group Global Witness says. A month after the military seized power in Myanmar and imprisoned elected leaders, Facebook\u2019s algorithms were still…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":281977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/06\/facebook-myanmar-04.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[110108,93113,4974,70376,70424,88643,1689,1621,4976],"class_list":["post-281976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-6-23-21","tag-coups","tag-facebook","tag-military","tag-myanmar","tag-propaganda","tag-protesters","tag-protests","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}