{"id":369328,"date":"2021-11-18T19:18:31","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T16:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/hate-speech-in-myanmar-continues-to-thrive-on-facebook\/"},"modified":"2021-11-18T19:18:31","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T16:18:31","slug":"hate-speech-in-myanmar-continues-to-thrive-on-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/hate-speech-in-myanmar-continues-to-thrive-on-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"#Hate speech in Myanmar continues to thrive on Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<strong>#Hate speech in Myanmar continues to thrive on <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook<\/a><\/strong>&#8221;<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/11\/AP21319688918169-1.jpg?quality=90&amp;strip=all\" \/><\/p>\n<div>\n<aside class=\"single__inline-module alignleft\">\n<\/aside>\n<p>JAKARTA, Indonesia \u2014 Years after coming under scrutiny for contributing to ethnic and religious violence in Myanmar, Facebook still has problems detecting and moderating hate speech and misinformation on its platform in the Southeast Asian nation, internal documents viewed by The Associated Press show.<\/p>\n<p>Three years ago, the company commissioned a report that found Facebook was used to \u201cfoment division and incite offline violence\u201d in the country. It pledged to do better and developed several tools and policies to deal with hate speech.<\/p>\n<p>But the breaches have persisted \u2014 and even been exploited by hostile actors \u2014 since the Feb. 1 military takeover this year that resulted in gruesome human rights abuses across the country.<\/p>\n<p>Scrolling through Facebook today, it\u2019s not hard to find posts threatening murder and rape in Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>One 2 1\/2 minute\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/watch\/?v=1069037143868374\" class=\"\">video<\/a>\u00a0posted on Oct. 24 of a supporter of the military calling for violence against opposition groups has garnered over 56,000 views.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo starting from now, we are the god of death for all (of them),\u201d the man says in Burmese while looking into the camera. \u201cCome tomorrow and let\u2019s see if you are real men or gays.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One account posts the home address of a military defector and a photo of his wife. Another post from Oct. 29 includes a\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/m.facebook.com\/story.php?story_fbid=1274070950041362&amp;id=100023154074035\" class=\"\">photo<\/a>\u00a0of soldiers leading bound and blindfolded men down a dirt path. The Burmese caption reads, \u201cDon\u2019t catch them alive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite the ongoing issues, Facebook saw its operations in Myanmar as both a model to export around the world and an evolving and caustic case. Documents reviewed by AP show Myanmar became a testing ground for new content moderation <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a>, with the social media giant trialing ways to automate the detection of hate speech and misinformation with varying levels of success.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook\u2019s internal discussions on Myanmar were revealed in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen\u2019s legal counsel. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/what-are-the-facebook-papers-10e59530a699db5345ac3931509778b2\">a consortium of news organizations<\/a>, including The Associated Press.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook has had a shorter but more volatile history in Myanmar than in most countries. After decades of censorship under military rule, Myanmar was connected to the internet in 2000. Shortly afterward, Facebook paired with telecom providers in the country, allowing customers to use the platform without needing to pay for the data, which was still expensive at the time. Use of the platform exploded. For many in Myanmar, Facebook became the internet itself.<\/p>\n<p>Htaike Htaike Aung, a Myanmar internet policy advocate, said it also became \u201ca hotbed for extremism\u201d around 2013, coinciding with religious riots across Myanmar between Buddhists and Muslims. It\u2019s unclear how much, if any, content moderation was h<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>ening at the time by people or automation.<\/p>\n<p>Htaike Htaike Aung said she met with Facebook that year and laid out issues, including how local organizations were seeing exponential amounts of hate speech on the platform and how its preventive mechanisms, such as reporting posts, didn\u2019t work in the Myanmar context.<\/p>\n<p>One example she cited was a photo of a pile of bamboo sticks that was posted with a caption reading, \u201cLet us be prepared because there\u2019s going to be a riot that is going to happen within the Muslim community.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Htaike Htaike Aung said the photo was reported to Facebook, but the company didn\u2019t take it down because it didn\u2019t violate any of the company\u2019s community standards.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhich is ridiculous because it was actually calling for violence. But Facebook didn\u2019t see it that way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Years later, the lack of moderation caught the attention of the international community. In March 2018, United Nations human rights experts investigating attacks against Myanmar\u2019s Muslim Rohingya minority said Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech.<\/p>\n<p>When asked about Myanmar a month later during a U.S. Senate hearing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied that Facebook planned to hire \u201cdozens\u201d of Burmese speakers to moderate content, would work with civil society groups to identify hate figures and develop new technologies to combat hate speech.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHate speech is very language specific. It\u2019s hard to do it without people who speak the local language and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n<p>Information in internal Facebook documents show that while the company did step up efforts to combat hate speech in the country, the tools and strategies to do so never came to full fruition, and individuals within the company repeatedly sounded the alarm. In one document from May 2020, an employee said a hate speech text classifier that was available wasn\u2019t being used or maintained. Another document from a month later said there were \u201csignificant gaps\u201d in misinformation detection in Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFacebook took symbolic actions I think were designed to mollify policymakers that something was being done and didn\u2019t need to look much deeper,\u201d said Ronan Lee, a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University of London\u2019s International State Crime Initiative.<\/p>\n<p>In an emailed statement to the AP, Rafael Frankel\u2019s, Facebook\u2019s director of policy for APAC Emerging Countries, said the platform \u201chas built a dedicated team of over 100 Burmese speakers.\u201d He declined to state exactly how many were employed. Online marketing company NapoleonCat\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/napoleoncat.com\/stats\/facebook-users-in-myanmar\/2021\/01\/#:~:text=There%20were%2028%20780%20000,group%20(12%20400%20000).\" class=\"\">estimates\u00a0<\/a>there are about 28.7 million Facebook users in Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>During her testimony to the European Union Parliament on Nov. 8, Haugen, the whistleblower, criticized Facebook for a lack of investment in third-party fact-checking, and relying instead on automatic systems to detect harmful content.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you focus on these automatic systems, they will not work for the most ethnically diverse places in the world, with linguistically diverse places in the world, which are often the most fragile,\u201d she said while referring to Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>After Zuckerberg\u2019s 2018 congressional testimony, Facebook developed digital tools to combat hate speech and misinformation and also created a new internal framework to manage crises like Myanmar around the world.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook crafted a list of \u201cat-risk countries\u201d with ranked tiers for a \u201ccritical countries team\u201d to focus its energy on, and also rated languages needing more content moderation. Myanmar was listed as a \u201cTier 1\u201d at-risk country, with Burmese deemed a \u201cpriority language\u201d alongside Ethiopian languages, Bengali, Arabic and Urdu.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook engineers taught Burmese slang words for \u201cMuslims\u201d and \u201cRohingya\u201d to its automated systems. They also trained systems to detect \u201ccoordinated inauthentic behavior\u201d such as a single person posting from multiple accounts, or coordination between different accounts to post the same content.<\/p>\n<p>The company also tried \u201crepeat offender demotion\u201d which lessened the impact of posts of users who frequently violated guidelines. In a test in two of the world\u2019s most volatile countries, demotion worked well in Ethiopia, but poorly in Myanmar \u2014 a difference that flummoxed engineers, according to a 2020 report included in the documents.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe aren\u2019t sure why \u2026 but this information provides a starting point for further analysis and user research,\u201d the report said. Facebook declined to comment on the record if the problem has been fixed a year after its detection, or about the success of the two tools in Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>The company also deployed a new tool to reduce the virality of content called \u201creshare depth promotion\u201d that boosts content shared by direct contacts, according to an internal 2020 report. This method is \u201ccontent-agnostic\u201d and cut viral inflammatory prevalence by 25% and photo misinformation by 48.5%, it said.<\/p>\n<p>Slur detection and demotion were judged effective enough that staffers shared the experience in Myanmar as part of a \u201cplaybook\u201d for acting in other at-risk countries such as Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Russia, the Philippines and Egypt.<\/p>\n<p>While these new methods forged in Myanmar\u2019s civil crises were deployed around the world, documents show that by June 2020 Facebook knew that flaws persisted in its Myanmar safety work.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe found significant gaps in our coverage (especially in Myanmar and Ethiopia), showcasing that our current signals may be inadequate,\u201d said an internal audit of the company\u2019s \u201cintegrity coverage.\u201d Myanmar was color-coded red with less than 55% coverage: worse than Syria but better than Ethiopia.<\/p>\n<p>Haugen criticized the company\u2019s internal policy of acting \u201conly once a crisis has begun.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Facebook \u201cslows the platform down instead of watching as the temperature gets hotter, and making the platform safer as that happens,\u201d she said during testimony to Britain\u2019s Parliament on Oct. 25.<\/p>\n<p>Frankel, the Facebook spokesperson, said the company has been proactive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFacebook\u2019s approach in Myanmar today is fundamentally different from what it was in 2017, and allegations that we have not invested in safety and security in the country are wrong,\u201d Frankel said.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, a September 2021 report by the\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/myanmar-social-media-insights.gitbook.io\/social-media-in-myanmar-after-the-coup\/-Mk7ZWwnPs4EhFsyaec6\/executive-summary\" class=\"\">Myanmar Social Media Insights Project<\/a>\u00a0found that posts on Facebook include coordinated targeting of activists, ethnic minorities and journalists -\u2013 a tactic that has roots in the military\u2019s history. The report also said the military is laundering its propaganda through public pages that claim to be media outlets.<\/p>\n<p>Opposition and pro-military groups have used the encrypted messaging app Telegram to organize two types of propaganda campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, according to an October report shared with the AP by Myanmar Witness, a U.K.-based organization that archives social media posts related to the conflict.<\/p>\n<p>Myanmar is a \u201chighly contested information environment,\u201d where users working in concert overload Facebook\u2019s reporting system to take down others\u2019 posts, and also spread coordinated misinformation and hate speech, the report said.<\/p>\n<p>In one example, the coordinated networks took video shot in Mexico in 2018 by the Sinaloa cartel of butchered bodies and falsely labeled it as evidence of the opposition killing Myanmar soldiers on June 28, 2021, said Benjamin Strick, director of investigations for Myanmar Witness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s a difficulty in catching it for some of these platforms that are so big and perhaps the teams to look for it are so small that it\u2019s very hard to catch water when it\u2019s coming out of a fire hydrant,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The organization also traced the digital footprint of one soldier at the incineration of\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/religion-myanmar-aung-san-suu-kyi-77ebb5eccc8b09d6e77975f6601cbbde\">160 homes in the village of Thantlang<\/a>\u00a0in late October. He posed in body armor on a ledge overlooking burning homes, with a post blaming opposition forces for the destruction in a litany of violent speech.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook \u201cconducted human rights due diligence to understand and address the risks in Myanmar,\u201d and banned the military and used technology to reduce the amount of violating content, spokesperson Frankel said.<\/p>\n<p>Yet Myanmar digital rights activists and scholars say Facebook could still take steps to improve, including greater openness about its policies for content moderation, demotion and removal, and acknowledging its responsibilities toward the Myanmar people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe need to start examining damage that has been done to our communities by platforms like Facebook. They portray that they are a virtual platform, and thus can have lower regulation,\u201d said Lee, the visiting scholar. \u201cThe fact is that there are real-world consequences.\u201d\n                        <\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. 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Three years&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":369329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/11\/AP21319688918169-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1024","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[119630,93113,4974,72649,70376,70424,81376,4976],"class_list":["post-369328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-18-21","tag-coups","tag-facebook","tag-hate-speech","tag-military","tag-myanmar","tag-rohingya","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369328","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=369328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}