{"id":2099,"date":"2018-12-18T07:10:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-18T07:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/?p=2099"},"modified":"2018-12-21T07:36:20","modified_gmt":"2018-12-21T07:36:20","slug":"facebook-removed-hundreds-more-accounts-linked-to-the-myanmar-military-for-posting-hate-speech-and-attacks-against-ethnic-minorities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/facebook-removed-hundreds-more-accounts-linked-to-the-myanmar-military-for-posting-hate-speech-and-attacks-against-ethnic-minorities\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook removed hundreds more accounts linked to the Myanmar military for posting hate speech and attacks against ethnic minorities"},"content":{"rendered":"
The accounts were sharing \u201canti-Rohingya messages\u201d \u2014\u00a0the same kind of messages that have played into a broader genocide in Myanmar.<\/h5>\n
By\u00a0Kurt Wagner<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\n

Facebook has discovered and removed another coordinated hate campaign operated by the Myanmar military, which has used the service to spread false news and insults about the Rohingya people, Myanmar\u2019s mostly Muslim ethnic minority.<\/p>\n

In a blog post published Tuesday night, Facebook said it took down 425 Pages and 150 additional Facebook and Instagram accounts \u201clinked to the Myanmar military.\u201d At least 2.5 million people \u201cfollowed at least one of these Facebook Pages,\u201d the company added.<\/p>\n

The Pages \u2014 which looked on the surface like \u201cnews, entertainment, beauty and lifestyle\u201d Pages \u2014 were actually \u201cperiodically being used to drive specific anti-Rohingya messages,\u201d said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook\u2019s head of cybersecurity policy, in an interview with\u00a0Recode<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the third time since August that Facebook has taken down Pages and accounts linked to the Myanmar military, and these new Pages were part of the same network of accounts Facebook removed in the past, a spokesperson confirmed. Facebook was able to link these accounts to the Myanmar military in a number of ways. In some cases, military personnel were listed as administrators on the Pages. In other cases, Facebook noticed \u201cinfrastructure overlap,\u201d such as matching IP addresses, between military devices and the Facebook accounts.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s actions here may be too late to fix Myanmar\u2019s problems.\u00a0<\/strong>The government and military of the mostly Buddhist country has been working to eliminate the country\u2019s Rohingya minority, and more than 725,000 Rohingya \u2014 out of a population estimated at just over one million \u2014 have fled to Bangladesh to escape\u00a0ethnic genocide in Myanmar<\/a>since late 2017, according to a\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0from the Human Rights Council.<\/p>\n

Facebook has been at the center of the government\u2019s campaign of hate and misinformation. The military has used Facebook to help spread propaganda to support that mission, and Facebook has been criticized for moving too slowly to stop the spread of this propaganda. Military officials in Myanmar \u201cwere the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that stretched back half a decade\u201d and targeted the Rohingya, as the New York Times\u00a0reported in October<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s particularly damning, considering Facebook\u2019s presence in Myanmar. The social network is used by an estimated 20 million people in Myanmar, or roughly 40 percent of the population. That\u2019s the same number of people who have the Internet there, according to a\u00a0human rights impact report Facebook commissioned<\/a>\u00a0and published in November. The Facebook app\u00a0comes preinstalled<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0many smartphones<\/a>\u00a0sold in the country.<\/p>\n

Those inside Facebook admit that the company was much too slow to find and remove these kinds of posts, and it\u2019s clear now that Facebook was not properly staffed up to execute the manual review necessary to take down posts from Myanmar that violate the company\u2019s community standards.<\/p>\n

When Facebook launched in Myanmar in 2011, it had \u201ca couple\u201d of full-time Burmese speakers on its moderation team, said Monika Bickert, Facebook\u2019s head of global content policy, in an interview. Now it has more than 100.<\/p>\n

Facebook claims that it is getting better at removing bad content, and Tuesday\u2019s account takedown is evidence that the company is making some progress. Facebook\u2019s artificial intelligence technology can proactively flag hate speech in the country at a much higher rate than it did one year ago, for example.\u00a0Facebook says<\/a>\u00a0its systems detected 63 percent of the hate speech it removed or suppressed last quarter, up from just 13 percent at the end of last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The accounts were sharing \u201canti-Rohingya messages\u201d \u2014\u00a0the same kind of messages that have played into a broader genocide in Myanmar. By\u00a0Kurt Wagner\u00a0 Facebook has discovered and removed another coordinated hate campaign operated by the Myanmar military, which has used the service to spread false news and insults about the Rohingya people, Myanmar\u2019s mostly Muslim ethnic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,4,41,16,19,37,39,42,3,12,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2102,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099\/revisions\/2102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arakanwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}