[Meta] Meta in Myanmar, Part III (an investigation into the role Facebook/Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar)
Part I : https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
Part II : https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis
Part IV : À venir
Meta in Myanmar, Part III: The Inside View
“Well, Congressman, I view our responsibility as not just building services that people like to use, but making sure that those services are also good for people and good for society overall.” — Mark Zuckerberg, 2018
In the previous two posts in this series, I did a long but briskly paced early history of Meta and the internet in Myanmar—and the hateful and dehumanizing speech that came with it—and then looked at what an outside-the-company view could reveal about Meta’s role in the genocide of the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017.
In this post, I’ll look at what two whistleblowers and a crucial newspaper investigation reveal about what was happening inside Meta at the time. Specifically, the disclosed information:
gives us a quantitative view of Meta’s content moderation performance—which, in turn, highlights a deceptive PR move routine Meta uses when questioned about moderation;
clarifies what Meta knew about the effects of its algorithmic recommendations systems; and
reveals a parasitic takeover of the Facebook platform by covert influence campaigns around the world—including in Myanmar.
Before we get into that, a brief personal note. There are few ways to be in the world that I enjoy less than “breathless conspiratorial.” That rhetorical mode muddies the water when people most need clarity and generates an emotional charge that works against effective decision-making. I really don’t like it. So it’s been unnerving to synthesize a lot of mostly public information and come up with results that wouldn’t look completely out of place in one of those overwrought threads.
I don’t know what to do with that except to be forthright but not dramatic, and to treat my readers’ endocrine systems with respect by avoiding needless flourishes. But the story is just rough and many people in it do bad things. (You can read my meta-post about terminology and sourcing if you want to see me agonize over the minutiae.)
Content warnings for the post: The whole series is about genocide and hate speech. There are no graphic descriptions or images, and this post includes no slurs or specific examples of hateful and inciting messages, but still. (And there’s a fairly unpleasant photograph of a spider at about the 40% mark.)
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La suite : https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-iii-the-inside-view