Facebook must compensate Rohingya over systematic hate speech: Amnesty

Paris, France (AFP):

Facebook must pay reparations to the Muslim Rohingya who were forced from their homes in Myanmar after a brutal genocide by the Myanmar military. In a damning report by Amnesty International, it has been brought to light that the onslaught against the Muslim Rohingyas was fired by intense hate, exacerbated by rampant online hate speech.

The Rohingya are a mainly Muslim minority belonging to Myanmar’s Rakhine state, who have never been recognized as citizens of their country and have been targeted for hate crimes. A genocidal campaign against the hapless community was mounted by Myanmar’s military rulers in 2017, as a result of which they were driven into neighbouring Bangladesh. Here the stateless people described as ‘the most persecuted community in the world’ have since lived in sprawling refugee camps, often in subhuman conditions.

Victims’ associations and rights advocates say the violence was ramped up by Facebook’s algorithms which play up extremist content that encourages harmful disinformation and hate speech.

“Many Rohingya tried to report anti-Rohingya content via Facebook’s ‘report’ function” but to no avail, “allowing these hateful narratives to proliferate and reach unprecedented audiences in Myanmar,” Amnesty said in its report.

It noted the revelations from the whistle-blower “Facebook Papers” divulged in October 2021, indicating that company executives knew the site fuelled the spread of toxic content against ethnic minorities and other groups.

Three legal suits have been lodged against Facebook by Rohingya representatives, in the US and Britain as well as with the OECD group of developed economies, under its guidelines for responsible business conduct.

In the US complaint, filed last December in California, the home state of Facebook and its parent company Meta, refugees are seeking $150 billion in damages.

“Meta’s refusal to compensate Rohingya victims to date -– even where the community’s modest requests represent crumbs from the table of the company’s enormous profits -– simply add to the perception that this is a company wholly detached from the reality of its human rights impacts,” Amnesty said.

The NGO urged Facebook to undertake “proactive human rights due diligence” across its platforms, but also called on national authorities to step up their oversight.

“It is imperative that states fulfil their obligation to protect human rights by introducing and enforcing effective legislation to rein in surveillance-based business models across the technology sector,” it said.

Facebook has vowed to revamp its corporate values and operations in response to pressure to clamp down on false information, particularly with regard to politics and elections.

The company has forged partnerships with several media companies intended to verify online posts and remove those that are untrue.

However, another report earlier this month had, exposed the fact that social media giants including Facebook, consistently fail to remove hateful content targeting Muslims in particular.

The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) said the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok are not acting on the anti-Muslim misinformation and hate speech content reported to them nearly 90% of the time.

CCDH reported 530 posts that had been viewed over 25.5 million times but only one out of ten posts were taken down by the platforms.

The posts had anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, dehumanising and negative depictions of Muslims, racist caricatures and sectarian Hindu nationalist hate speech.