While Facebook policy disallows hate speech, Facebook’s overwhelming popularity in politically turbulent Myanmar means the platform is widely abused to disseminate hate speech and fake news— particularly anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiment—with disastrous consequences. The UN describes the mass exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmar as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and recently determined that top military officials be prosecuted for committing genocide, referencing the role of Facebook in propagating hatred towards the vulnerable group. A recent Reuters investigation found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims that had for years evaded the platform’s content monitoring and remained on Facebook in Burmese language.

Facebook has been both reluctant and, more recently, incapable of addressing the platform’s role as a medium for inciting violence in Myanmar. While the company is eager to enter new developing markets for profit, its systems are not equipped to handle complex language translation, to understand localised political knowledge, or to account for abysmal levels of media literacy in these locations. For example, Facebook’s auto-translation system has problems translating Burmese, providing bizarre results; one post referenced in the Reuters investigation was translated from Burmese saying “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive” into English as “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar.” Facebook subsequently disabled the Burmese auto-translation feature for ordinary Facebook users after the Reuters investigation was published.

Myanmar’s civil society groups claim that Facebook AI’s ability to proactively identify offending content is highly limited, given that merely tracing certain keywords such as “Ma Ba Tha” (a Buddhist group widely associated with religious nationalism) may not accurately reflect the content of posts. For example, the term ကုလား (Kalar) which is commonly used as a slur against Muslims,  was banned and then un-banned in 2017, after Facebook realised it unintentionally censored several unrelated posts containing the term. The root word references the Indian subcontinent, and is sometimes also used to reference foreign qualities in general, and is used in many common words such as ကုလားပဲ kalar-pe (chickpeas), ကုလားထိုင် kalar-tain (armchair), or ကုလားတည် kalar-de (Indian style pickled fruits/vegetables). The dual usage of Zawgyi and Unicode encoding for Burmese text further makes auto-detection difficult. Rather than rendering all Burmese text through Unicode, the international standard for character encoding, Myanmar uses a second system called Zawgyi which is most popular on Facebook. It is thus not surprising that Facebook’s primary way of approaching hate speech has been an overreliance on third parties such as civil society organisations, who flag content for review to a small team of Burmese-speaking staff, none whom are based in Myanmar—in fact, Facebook has no presence within Myanmar full stop.