Is Facebook finally making progress in Myanmar?

Is Facebook finally making progress in Myanmar?

Yes, Facebook is currently under fire in the Western World for its latest security gaffe. You can read about that at the New York Times which has a great write-up about just who Facebook allowed to have user data. However, news that may get lost in the shuffle is that Facebook recently made a pretty significant step in trying to curb the ethnic violence in Myanmar.

As you may know, Facebook has largely been used by the Buddhist majority Government in Myanmar in order to spread disinformation and hate speech against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Initially, Facebook was slow in enacting measures to try to curb the use of their platform for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Facebook increased their Burmese speaking team and deleted a number of accounts on both Facebook and Instagram that were encouraging violence against the Rohingya. Facebook even deleted the account of a high-ranking Myanmar military official. These were accounts that were very blatant in their hatred for the Rohingya people. Now, Facebook has started going after accounts that are trying to be more subtle.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it had deleted the accounts of 135 Facebook users in Myanmar, 425 Pages, 17 Groups, and 15 Instagram accounts. This may not seem like a lot, but these accounts in total had over 2.5 million followers which is 10% of the total internet users in Myanmar. These accounts were trying to be clever by posing as news, entertainment, and beauty and lifestyle accounts but Facebook says that they took action because of “the behavior of these actors rather than on the type of content they were posting.” This is a definite change in Facebook’s Myanmar strategy as previously, they waited for someone else to take action before Facebook did anything.

This is a step in the right direction for Facebook which has largely stumbled over the past year, not just in Myanmar but worldwide. It remains to be seen if this will be a continuing trend for Facebook’s social responsibility, we just hope it isn’t too little too late.