Facebook has issued an apology to rights groups in Myanmar for not crediting the role they play in combating hate speech on the platform.
The apology came after Zuckerberg said in an interview that messaging filter systems were catching and restricting hate messages in Myanmar.
But NGOs on the ground in Myanmar fighting hate speech, where the Muslim minority has faced violence the in Rohingya region, took issue with the Facebook’s claims.
“In your interview, you refer to your detection ‘systems’. We believe your system, in this case, was us — and we were far from systematic. We identified the messages and escalated them to your team via email on Saturday the 9th September, Myanmar time. By then, the messages had already been circulating widely for three days,” the group penned in an open letter addressed “Dear Mark”
The letter additionally argued that this was not an isolated incident.
“This case further epitomizes the kind of issues that have been rife on Facebook in Myanmar for more than four years now and the inadequate response of the Facebook team.”
https://twitter.com/Phandeeyar/status/981942970185203712
The group posted images of messages saying:
“The messages (pictured and translated below) were clear examples of your tools being used to incite real harm. Far from being stopped, they spread in an unprecedented way, reaching country-wide and causing widespread fear and at least three violent incidents in the process.”
In a statement to BuzzFeed News on Friday, a spokesperson for Facebook apologized that Zuckerberg did not acknowledge the role of the organizations in fighting hate speech.
“We should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content,” the spokesperson said. “We are rolling out the ability to report content in Messenger, and have added more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from across all our services.”
Rights groups have been highly critical of the U.S. social media giant accusing it spreading “fake news” that worsened already heated ethnic tensions between Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and its minority Muslim populations.
Download the full Myanmar – Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg.
