Rohingya refugees have sued Facebook for more than US$150 billion, accusing it of failing to stop hate speech that incited violence against the Muslim ethnic group by military rulers and their supporters in Myanmar.
Years after coming under scrutiny for contributing to ethnic and religious violence in Myanmar, internal Facebook documents show that the company still has problems defining and moderating hate speech and misinformation on its platform in the country.
Since the Feb. 1 coup by the military, the breaches have even been exploited by hostile actors, resulting in human rights abuses across the country.
The Rohingyas’ claims were fortified by revelations in internal company documents that former Facebook employee and whistle-blower Frances Haugen provided this fall to the US Congress and US securities regulators. The documents could also serve to buttress potential legal action by other groups around the world harmed by hate speech and misinformation on Facebook.
On Monday last week, lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Facebook parent Meta Platforms, saying that Facebook’s arrival in Myanmar helped spread hate speech, misinformation and incitement to violence that “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.”
Lawyers in the UK have issued notice of their intention to file a similar legal action.
Facebook said in a statement on Tuesday last week that it is “appalled by the crimes committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar,” and has built a team of Burmese speakers and invested in technology to take action against harmful misinformation there.
The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group forced to flee persecution and violence in Myanmar starting in 2017, with an estimated 1 million living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. About 10,000 have ended up in the US.
In 2018, UN human rights experts investigating attacks against the Rohingya said that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech.
More than 10,000 Rohingya have been killed and more than 150,000 were subject to physical violence, law firms organizing the cases said.
The lawsuits say that Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech against Rohingya, and the company did not spend enough money to hire moderators and fact-checkers who spoke the local languages or understood the political situation.
They say that Facebook failed to shut accounts and pages, or remove posts inciting violence or using hate speech directed at the ethnic group.
Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, arranging for millions of residents to access the Internet for the first time, says a lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California, County of San Mateo.
The company did little to warn people about the dangers of online misinformation and fake accounts — tactics employed by the military in its campaign against the Rohingya, the lawsuits says.
Facebook said in its statement that it banned the military, known as the Tatmadaw, from its platform, while also working to disrupt networks trying to manipulate public behavior in the country.
The lawsuit says Facebook knew that rewarding users for posting dangerous content and allowing fake accounts created by autocrats to flourish would radicalize users.
“The resulting Facebook-fueled anti-Rohingya sentiment motivated and enabled the military government of Myanmar to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” it says.
Myanmar was one of several locations mentioned in documents brought to light by Haugen, which also detailed content-monitoring lapses in Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip, India, and Dubai and the United Arab Emirates.
In the US, extremist misinformation and inflammatory content on Facebook egged on supporters of then-US president Donald Trump in the days and weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, raising the question of whether injured Capitol and District of Columbia police officers might seek to hold the company responsible.
The documents open a window into how Facebook’s conflicting impulses — to nurture its business and protect democracy — clashed in the run-up to the insurrection.
“Across the board, the Facebook papers give civil rights advocates and others a lot of ammunition for their advocacy work,” Washington attorney Peter Romer-Friedman said.
Romer-Friedman is lead attorney for a lawsuit filed in April by the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates against Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives, accusing them of falsely claiming that the company removes anti-Muslim rhetoric and other hate speech from the platform.
The lawsuit has garnered support from consumer groups and the District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine.
Romer-Friedman said that their case was bolstered “100 percent” by the internal documents shared by Haugen.
“The world has changed a lot since early September,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles based on the documents obtained by Haugen in September, and she went public in early October in a television interview and testimony to a US Senate panel.
Another youth-led group of Rohingya based at a refugee camp in Bangladesh said that it was planning a separate filing against Meta with the watchdog Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, calling for the company to provide some remediation programs in the camps.
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