Whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s testimony to US senators on Tuesday shone a light on violence and instability in Myanmar and Ethiopia in the past few years and long-held concerns about links with activity on Facebook.
“What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it,” the former Facebook manager said in her striking testimony.
She said that Facebook was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US.
Photo: Reuters
About half of Myanmar’s population of 53 million use Facebook, with many relying on the site as their primary source of news.
In June, an investigation by the rights group Global Witness found that Facebook’s algorithm was promoting posts in breach of its own policies that incited violence against protesters marching against the coup launched by the military in February.
Researchers began by liking a Myanmar military fan page, which was not seen to be contravening Facebook’s terms. They found that Facebook then suggested several pro-military pages that did contain abusive content.
“We didn’t have to look hard to find this content; FB’s [Facebook’s] algorithm led us to it,” said Rosie Sharpe, a digital researcher who worked on the report. “Of the first five pages they recommended, three of them contained content that broke FB’s rules by, for example, inciting or glorifying violence.”
The link between social media posts and offline violence in Myanmar had already been widely documented. In 2018, a Guardian analysis revealed that hate speech exploded on Facebook at the start of the Rohingya crisis the year before, when attacks by armed groups and ordinary communities on people from the Muslim minority erupted.
Thousands of posts by nationalist, anti-Rohingya supporters gained traction online, including posts that falsely claimed mosques were stockpiling weapons.
An independent investigation commissioned by Facebook later agreed with assessments that the site had been used to incite offline violence.
“What happens on Facebook matters,” Sharpe said. “Promotion of violence online leads to real-world harms. That’s particularly true in Myanmar, where Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the military’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya.”
Facebook has faced similar criticism in Ethiopia, which has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. In 2019, for instance, the retired Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie blamed “fake news” being shared on Facebook for violence that left 81 people dead in Oromia region.
After another outbreak of ethnic violence last year — sparked by the killing of a popular singer from the Oromo ethnic group — an investigation by Vice claimed that the violence had been “supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people’s anger.”
In her testimony, Haugen blamed engagement-based ranking for “literally fanning ethnic violence” in countries such as Ethiopia.
“Facebook ... knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world,” Haugen said. “And that’s what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia.”
Sharpe said legislators were not doing enough to hold social media companies to account.
“The EU has gone the furthest towards doing this. There’s draft legislation in the EU, the digital services act. If it was passed it would require very large online platforms to have to assess and mitigate the risk of their algorithms spreading content that impacts on our rights. However, the proposed law doesn’t go far enough as it would only give regulators the opportunity to scrutinize how algorithms work when they suspect wrongdoing.”
Facebook has pushed back forcefully against Haugen’s accusations.
In a post published on Tuesday evening, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said that “it’s just not true” that the company puts profit over safety.
Two-year-old Xu Haoyang (徐灝洋) has likely just months to live — but the only medicine that can help his rare genetic condition is not found anywhere in China and closed borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic mean that he cannot travel for treatment. Instead, his desperate father, Xu Wei (徐偉), has created a home laboratory to create a remedy for the boy himself. “I didn’t really have time to think about whether to do it or not. It had to be done,” the 30-year-old said from his DIY lab in an apartment building in southwestern Kunming. Haoyang has Menkes syndrome, a genetic disorder
BURNING, LOOTING: The demonstrators called for Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to step down over failure to deliver infrastructure, among other complaints Solomon Islands police yesterday fired tear gas in the capital, Honiara, as crowds of protesters set fire to buildings, including a police station, and looted shops in an eruption of anger at the government, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported. The protest was led by people from the Pacific nation’s largest island, Malaita Province, about 120km from the capital. They were demanding that Solomon Island Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare step down over failure to deliver promised infrastructure among other complaints, RNZ said. The protest began peacefully, but most schools and businesses in Honiara were closed by the afternoon as crowds tried to enter the
MOBS, TEAR GAS: Anti-government protests deteriorated and led to looting and arson, as the Pacific nation’s PM said he regretted a return to the country’s ‘dark days’ Rioters torched buildings in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara yesterday, targeting the city’s Chinatown district in a second day of anti-government protests. Eyewitnesses and local media reported that crowds had defied a government lockdown to take to the streets. Live images showed several buildings engulfed in flames and plumes of thick black smoke billowing high above the capital. It followed widespread disorder on Wednesday, when demonstrators attempted to storm parliament and depose Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Businesses operated by Honiara’s Chinese community were looted and burned, prompting Beijing’s embassy to express “serious concerns” to the Solomons’ government. The embassy “made representations
IMBALANCE: An annual survey found that 48 percent of people eat either too little or too much, resulting in them being overweight, obese or underweight Nearly half the world’s population suffer from poor nutrition linked to too much or not enough food, a global assessment said yesterday, with wide-ranging impacts on health and the planet. The Global Nutrition Report (GNR), a yearly survey and analysis of the latest data on nutrition and related health issues, found that 48 percent of people currently eat either too little or too much — resulting in them being overweight, obese or underweight. At current rates, the world would fail to meet eight out of nine nutrition targets set by the WHO for 2025, it said. These include reducing child wasting (when
RSS