A US federal judge on Wednesday ordered Facebook to release records of accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar that the social media giant had shut down, rejecting its argument about protecting privacy as “rich with irony.”
The Washington judge criticized Facebook for failing to hand over information to investigators seeking to prosecute the country for international crimes against the Muslim minority Rohingya, a copy of the ruling said.
Facebook had refused to release the data, saying that it would contravene a US law barring electronic communication services from disclosing users’ communications.
However, the judge said that the posts, which were deleted, would not be covered under the law and not sharing the content would “compound the tragedy that has befallen the Rohingya.”
“Facebook taking up the mantle of privacy rights is rich with irony. News sites have entire sections dedicated to Facebook’s sordid history of privacy scandals,” he wrote.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the company was reviewing the decision and that it had made “voluntary, lawful disclosures” to another UN body, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.
More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and burning of villages.
Burmese authorities say that they were battling an insurgency and deny systematic atrocities.
The army crackdown, during the rule of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government, did not create much of an outcry in the Buddhist-majority nation, where the Rohingya are widely derided as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Gambia wants the data for a case against Myanmar that it is pursuing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing Myanmar of breaching the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.
In 2018, UN human rights investigators said that Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fueled the violence.
A Reuters investigation that year found more than 1,000 examples of hate speech on Facebook, including calling Rohingya and other Muslims “dogs,” “maggots” and “rapists,” suggesting that they be fed to pigs, and urging that they be shot or exterminated.
Facebook at the time said that it had been “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” in Myanmar.
In Wednesday’s ruling, US Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said that Facebook had taken a first step by deleting the “content that fueled a genocide,” but had “stumbled” by not sharing it.
“A surgeon that excises a tumor does not merely throw it in the trash. She seeks a pathology report to identify the disease,” he said.
“Locking away the requested content would be throwing away the opportunity to understand how disinformation begat genocide of the Rohingya and would foreclose a reckoning at the ICJ,” he added.
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