Greg's Corner

Facebook failing in the fight to stop ethnic cleansing

I’ve been posting about Facebook’s role in the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar for a little while now. If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, the Rohingya Muslim minority in the country formerly known as Burma has not only been run out of their homes by the Myanmar military, but they’ve also been the victims of hate crimes and ethnic cleansing that is fueled by the Buddhist majority. The Rohingya are considered to be the most persecuted people currently in the world today. Previously, Facebook has given non-committal answers about their efforts to help stop the human rights abuses in Myanmar, but a new report says Facebook is failing horribly to curb the tide of ethnic violence in the country.

WARNING: The following video may contain images and language that some may find disturbing.

A report from Reuters (via CNBC) says that since the problem of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar has been brought to Facebook’s attention, they’ve done little about it. In a country of 100 million people where roughly three-quarters of the population use Facebook as their only news source, Facebook has only employed a handful of people who speak and read Burmese. The Reuters report also found posts that incite violence against the Rohingya going back as far as six years that are still active on the platform. This further shows that Facebook’s global power has gotten way out of their own control to the detriment of humanity.

Now some in the West may ignore this problem because it doesn’t concern us but think of this. What if this was happening in our country? What if 75% of the population was looking to drive certain ethnicities or religions from the U.S. because of what they read on Facebook. What if that turned into the mass killings of those oppressed people and the government was to look the other way? Then you look at things like the proliferation of hate groups on Facebook in the United States and you have to ask yourself how close are we to becoming like Myanmar?