Joey Mendez Soc 122

Joey Mendez

Discussion Paper

Facebook is being blamed for playing "Instrumental" role of Burma's ethnic cleansing campaign of Rohingya. Seven soldiers have been sentenced to ten years in prison for the massacre of Rohingya Muslims in the village of Inn Din in western Rakhine State. 10 bodies were found in a mass grave last September. People have been asking Facebook for your years to regulate hate speech on their app against the Rohingya because it has caused a rise in violence against the community. A senator question Mark Zuckerberg the founder of facebook yesterday at a hearing. The senator went on to say you blamed facebook for playing a role in this genocide. Zuckerberg went on to say that they are working on the problem to get hate speech taken down from the website. Zuckerberg said there are three specific things facebook is working on. One being that they are hiring dozens of people to review the content. Second is that they are working with civil societies to identify specific hate figures so that they could take down their accounts rather than specific pieces of content. Third is that facebook is standing up a product team to do specific product changes in other countries that may have some issues in the future to prevent this from happening. Zeynep Tufekci felt that the situation facebook allowed was inexcusable because since 2013 society groups have been begging facebook to step up. Why after so long is facebook just now starting to fix things? Is it because they are now in front of a senator or is it because they are now seeing what harm their app is causing to these places. She explained that when that when facebook and other apps came over to their place, that there was no oversight. Myanmar started using facebook to post all these false accusations where tons of people would see. These post would go viral. People have been bugging Zuckerberg for years to stop this from being allowed. A country that is going through an ethnic cleansing should have been stopped from posting such things many years ago when people first started complaining about it. Tufekci went on to say this is a perfect example of what facebook's lack of external drive for proper oversight and what our societies lack of attention to intervene. If this would have happened earlier less people have died and less problems would be going on in these places. It's crazy to me to hear that it took that long to actually make a change to their app. If this problem was going on in the U.S or any other big country, this problem would have been fixed immediately. It should not have taken that long.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/11/how_facebook_played_instrumental_role_in