With all the violence—not to mention the torrent of misinformation—that was channeled through Facebook, its international reputation has taken a battering. Yet, to Facebook’s credit, they are trying to make positive changes in the hope that the future use of the platform will not be manipulated to manufacture, distil, and disseminate hate-speech and fake news, as it has been in recent years. Some of these moves include the expansion of the existing team of Burmese language moderators, which stood at 60 in August. The Facebook Newsroom targets 100 by the end of the year. While Paulsen says this is not enough for Myanmar’s 15-20 million users, 60 or 100 moderators represents an enormous increase from the two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese in 2015; in 2014, it was just one, based in Dublin. Furthermore, in September, Sky News reported that Facebook is set to hire a Human Rights Director ‘to address how it could be contributing to human rights abuses.’

Beyond dramatically expanding its critically understaffed Burmese team, Facebook HQ has begun to re-invest some of their profits into their Myanmar operations more broadly. Sara Su, who penned Facebook’s update in mid-August, said that much of this fiscal input has gone into developing and improving its AI to better detect—and prevent—the spread of hate-speech, misinformation, and other interactions that break Facebook’s policies. Improvements have also been made to the reporting mechanisms and Burmese-friendly drop-down menus that seek to speed up the slow process of responding to flagged content, hitherto greatly inhibited by technical hurdles.

It should also be considered a positive move that Facebook seems to have (eventually) listened to the advice of those on the ground, namely Phandeeyar, who with others, including Mido, Burma Monitor, and Equality Myanmar, jointly wrote to Zuckerberg after the Facebook CEO claimed credit for their work during an interview with Vox. Zuckerberg replied to the local companies personally, admitted to several failings, and committed to doing better.

More recently still, on November 5th 2018, Alex Warofka, Product Policy Manager for Facebook wrote, ‘[w]e commissioned an independent human rights impact assessment on the role of our services in Myanmar. […] The assessment was completed by BSR (Business for Social Responsibility)—an independent non-profit organisations with expertise in human rights practices and policies—in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and our pledge as a member of the Global Network Initiative.’ The update by Warofka from the Facebook Newsroom confirms what Zuckerberg and previous updates declared earlier: that they weren’t doing enough and should do more. The BSR report, the Facebook’s announcement says,  further ‘recommends that Facebook adopt a stand-alone human rights policy, establish formalised governance structures to oversee the company’s human rights strategy, and provide regular updates on progress made.’

Almost certainly, the most far-reaching response to Facebook’s earlier inaction was the deletion of 18 accounts linked to senior army officers, including C-in-C SG Min Aung Hlaing, for their alleged roles in the brutal counterinsurgency in Rakhine State. This bold response coincided with the release of the UN’s Fact Finding Mission’s report. This was the first time that the social media giant had deleted the account of any country’s military or political leaders and should not be underestimated. In the view of such journalistic mainstays as Thompson Chau (Myanmar Times), San Yamin Aung (The Irrawaddy), and Frontier Myanmar‘s Editorial Team, removing Myanmar’s top army brass from the platform has done more to harm these individuals than international pressure and the talk of re-imposed sanctions. Given this, a Guardian editorial posited that Zuckerberg was more powerful than the UN Secretary General in Myanmar, ‘since he could, if he wished, cut off one of the main distribution channels for propaganda against the Rohingya and other minorities.’

Reading through Warofka’s post-BSR report update, it does feel like Facebook has taken the criticism onboard and positively responded with several intelligent changes in the light of heavy criticisms, such as in the UN’s Fact-Finding Mission’s 444-page behemoth that mentioned Facebook nearly three-hundred times.

While I am personally optimistic (from a non-technical perspective) about Facebook’s efforts, it would be naive for me to not at least offer a caveat or two. A more cynical assessment of Facebook’s mitigation strategies, therefore, might first point to the company’s annus horribilis. Not only has Facebook’s involvement in the Rohingya crisis (hitherto unprecedented in its scale and brutality) negatively affected the company’s reputation for more than a year, Menlo Park also had to deal with the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, its unclear involvement regarding the 2016 US Presidential elections (as well as various controversies surrounding the ‘Brexit’ referendum in the United Kingdom), and was also required to very publicly face US senators back in April to explain such controversies. Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc. certainly received more than one black eye prior to the release of the UN’s FFM (the release of which coincided with the very overt, public, loud deletion of all those army officers and associated pages as already discussed). One could certainly—and not unreasonably—see Facebook’s post-UN FFM actions as an immediate band-aid to a gushing laceration.

The second caveat is the how much power Facebook actually has in Myanmar. A smaller group of experts suggest that Facebook’s power is much more limited than many perceive, and while Facebook has had some role in Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts, particular against the Rohingya, another school of thought says that these problems happened long before Facebook arrived and would have continued on regardless. For example, Mark Farmaner, Director of Burma Campaign UK, ‘t[old] TIME that, “violence against the Rohingya would have happened with or without Facebook.”’

Ultimately, the motivation for reform matters as it belies Facebook’s intentionality to improve things in an already fragile, volatile country. Questions about Facebook’s timing for accepting its responsibilities and instigating change need to be asked to better assess their future progress in curbing the more dangerous aspects of its platform’s usage. Perhaps the most pressing question we should be asking Zuckerberg and Co. is this: would have expensive mitigation strategies have been implemented if 2018 was, in fact, an annus mirabilis absent of all those very public—and negative—stories? I’m not sure; but the short history of Facebook in Myanmar might provide some pause for thought, particularly when June and October 2012 in Rakhine State are considered.