11 ms·

Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View

212 points by joeyh 3y ago

3np 3y ago
Part I HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  And Part II https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728849
gmerc 3y ago
The Senate hearing was really the final confirmation anyone needed our elected representatives are woefully outmatched. Calling out the simple statistic slight of hand would have been a sure fire way of establishing control and the impression of hard on big tech they wanted. It was delivered on a platter. Instead of that we got “Senator we run ads” and stupid gotcha games trying to prove FB was biased against conservatives when it was painfully clear that Joel Kaplan had fully taken over the bias department in favor of his friends (preventing misinformation action on the news surface because, shocker, it came 90% from conservative staples like Drudge report)
goodbyesf 3y ago
[flagged]
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  This article uses Meta’s own definition, next question
  - goodbyesf 3y ago
    > This article uses Meta’s own definition, next question The definition meta was forced to adopt by the likes of the author. A nonsense definition. And it's not just meta, it's pretty much every american and european company was forced to adopt it. How amazing huh?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gmerc 3y ago
  This article is well sourced, transparent about definitions and data. It’s a post child for high quality content. And you are rambling about propaganda, trying to move the question of the quality of reporting and data to “who is the author”, some casual whataboutism about “why don’t they do something else” and outright miss the point where the definition for hatespeech used is clearly the one Meta themselves defined. Then again your overall comment profile is just that, so if you want to make it about who is the author, you probably have to accept a “who are you”
- coolbreezetft22 3y ago
  > Isn't the problem in myanmar that we are trying to overthrow their government? What a ridiculous comment. Mynammar is in a civil war because their own people are trying to overthrow their government, which is oppressive and autocratic.
- andrepd 3y ago
  >Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc? What a wild take. "Nazism", "communism", and what is happening in Myanmar are three things with nothing in common whatsoever. What an absurd oversimplification. >Also, why is it always 'hate speech' when one side does it. It's not, my friend.
- catlover76 3y ago
  You're using a lot of words and terms you think make a point, and they aren't. There is no point in logically engaging with you. As you know, there is an actual genocide against Burmese Muslims by the Burmese government and large segments of its society. It's ongoing. You are pro-genocide. I don't even think you have anything against Burmese Muslims. I think people like you are moved to anger by others seeking to pursue good. Whoever the victim is, you have a disease of personality and spirit that causes you to attack attempts at sympathy or help towards them. Whatever the broader society or group values, you instinctively tear down. You think whenever someone wants to shed light on an injustice, you should shit on such an attempt mindlessly. Whenever someone wants to act altruistically, you want to make it seem like they aren't really being altruistic, that they must have some ulterior motive. Because you yourself aren't altruistic, and have no good, and don't care about the suffering of others. Why are you calling it propaganda? It's a well-documented article, whereas you spew stupidity. Who are you trying to fool by acting like the Burmese government is legitimate? Are a government like the North Korean one and the government that allows you to post the drivel you post freely alike? The rest of us needn't do anything but down vote you and avoid people like you in real life. It's not even a matter of understanding or misunderstanding something logically; you know that the government of Burma is genocidal and oppressive, you know that the government of Iran is oppressive and rising to ever new heights of brutality, etc, and you know that normal people rightly find that all wrong. But something inside you causes you to want to launch pathetic half-baked defenses of such evil in online posts. Something inside you is rotten and causes you to call a detailed post documenting a pretty evil paper trail from a major corporation--pretty stereotypically what we think good journalism should be, and which we get little of from most major publications--"propaganda".
- rakoo 3y ago
  I think you're mixing up "people in Myanmar" and "the Myanmar government". The post is primarily talking about the first one, and Facebook has had an effect on the first one. > Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc? Yes it is > So what erin wants is meta to serve as an anti-myanmar propaganda machine? What the author wants is that facebook doesn't propagate hate speech by putting it up in front just because it makes clicks and money. What the author wants is that when people report hate speech, facebook acts on it. What the author wants is to take on its responsibility as a facilitator to the genocide. > If she wants less suffering why doesn't she advocate that the UK, EU, US, etc stop trying to overthrow the government of myanmar? That's not the topic of the article. Please remain on topic. > It's funny because her article could be classified as hate speech by the people of myanmar. And why is this propaganda on HN? Everything is sourced. Not a single word in the articles calls for the hate of any people, not even Mark Zuckerberg. Please elaborate where you find hateful content.
jowea 3y ago
The previous parts do say that Facebook was not doing well even when it was just disorganized masses and some provocateurs, but I am the only one who feels it is weird that Facebook, a private company, is expect to "fight" state organizations? Is this consequence of free market capitalism really how the US should do things?
- rakoo 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >without inciting a mass genocide The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook was just one of the communication mediums they used. >capitalism should be abolished Pretty rich saying this while commenting on Myanmar. Myanmar did abolish capitalism, that's why they have a communist government, and nobody has the power to stand up to the government because no capitalism == no private property. Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people in the government are allowed to own property", and on top of that constructing a violent state apparatus to destroy anyone who dares to acquire property of their own. You can't abolish capitalism without also having groups of armed men arresting or killing anyone who tries to open a shop, because violently intervening is the only way to stop two willing parties from trading with each other. And this is not exaggeration, it's literally what happened in China and Russia after the communist revolutions.
    - rakoo 3y ago
      > The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook was just one of the communication mediums they used. It's not about who did the genocide, it's about what was the role of Facebook in the genocide > Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people in the government are allowed to own property" As you said before, abolishing capitalism means abolishing private property. If the government has property, capitalism wasn't abolished; in fact, as what happened in USSR and China, capitalism wasn't abolished, it was only enabled for a different subset of the population. > and on top of that constructing a violent state apparatus to destroy anyone who dares to acquire property of their own. Surely you know about communist and socialist ideology and don't imply that a state is still necessary
arczyx 3y ago
So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose the latter, just as what we can expect from big corporations nowadays. Not an unexpected decision overall, but it did surprise me how low Facebook can stoop. Like, they didn't even bother to fix their stuff in Myanmar after all these years with Myanmar being the poster child of their hate speech problem! > In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta’s operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate speech aimed at the Rohingya—actual posts from the period of the genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings I’ve been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-language Facebook advertisements. > Meta accepted all eight ads.
- cm2012 3y ago
  I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar was in a civil war at all. (Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this).
  - arczyx 3y ago
    > At worst its negligence According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed" is more appropriate. > Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and “foreign adversaries.”
    - cm2012 3y ago
      That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.
theptip 3y ago
> the most generous number from the disclosed memos has Meta removing 5% of hate speech on Facebook. That would mean that for every 2,000 hateful posts or comments, Meta removes about 100–95 automatically and 5 via user reports. Its really hard to contextualize these numbers. What are the comparable rates for other media? What % of hate speech on Mastodon is taken down? Twitter? YouTube? Discord? Comparing with old-school mob formation technology, what about leaflets handed out? Political rallies? Meta is an obvious target because they have such a high % of total online speech, and by virtue of this make a potentially impactful single intervention point to make things better. And these articles do make it seem they have room at the margin to improve. But imagine a word with multiple social networks per country - do we think they would be better or worse at policing this stuff (and crucially, the places where it matters are the developing less-regulated countries, often with governments that are at least disinterested in preventing the ethnic conflicts, if not actively promoting them)? I can see hand-wavey arguments in both directions but what I really want is data analyzing the question.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  Less developed countries are typically more willing to and more abusive in controlling expression than more developed ones. That is by no means a rule though. The question, of course, is whether there is a political will to "police hate speech". In reality this already dubiously noble goal is as flexible as the definition of "terrorist organisation".
- arczyx 3y ago
  Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way more than 5%), and then decided to rollback it. > And this method works. In Myanmar, “reshare depth demotion” reduced “viral inflammatory prevalence” by 25% and cut “photo misinformation” almost in half. > In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were over.
  - 3y ago
photochemsyn 3y ago
This series is an interesting view into Meta's internal policies - but historically it lacks a great of context and doesn't explain the roots of the conflict that led to the mass exodus of Rohingya people from Myanmar - in fact the author is almost entirely silent on a key issue that exacerbated the situation: Saudi-Pakistani efforts to run a regime change operation based in the Rohingya region. See Reuters, 2016: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmars-rohingya-insurgency-has-links-to-saudi-pakistan-report-idUSKBN1450Y7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmars... > "“Though not confirmed, there are indications he went to Pakistan and possibly elsewhere, and that he received practical training in modern guerrilla warfare,” the group said. It noted that Ata Ullah was one of 20 Rohingya from Saudi Arabia leading the group’s operations in Rakhine State. Separately, a committee of 20 senior Rohingya emigres oversees the group, which has headquarters in Mecca, the ICG said." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataullah_abu_Ammar_Jununi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataullah_abu_Ammar_Jununi That certainly doesn't justify the response of the Myanmar government, but it helps explain it to some degree - imagine the US political response if, say, US border facilities were attacked by an Iran-based group that killed a dozen US border guards. Entirely neglecting this background is just bad journalism, and also distorts the role of Meta. It's highly unlikely, given this information, that a rigorous censorship strategy on Meta would have changed the outcome much if at all. A more rational conclusion is that the Myanmar government viewed the Rohingya people as a potential base for Saudi/Pakistani-backed terror groups to launch attacks within Myanmar, and that was the root cause of the expulsion, and that social media-based propaganda efforts were not that important in understanding what happened. I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  > I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship At issue here is the PROMOTION of misinformation, lies and genocidal speech (in users' feeds), not the fact that they haven't deleted it.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  > I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity. Demonstrating that fact is a really poor substitute for taking some kind of action against an ongoing genocide.
g-b-r 3y ago
We need a Nuremberg trial for Facebook (without the death sentences, which I don't support for anyone)
- deleted 3y ago
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- gizmo385 3y ago
  What exactly is the target of the comparison here? Facebooks existence? Its behavior? And whatever that thing is, to be clear, you are comparing it to the crimes against humanity committed by the nazis during world war 2? Regardless of whether you like or dislike Facebook, that comparison seems patently absurd.
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    It for example faciliated a genocide, the rise or confirmation of authoritarian and bloody regimes, and kept consciously doing it if you read the article. The reference to Nuremberg was more for an example of an international trial than for the nazis, although faciliting a smaller scale genocide does somehow seem to have a relationship with the nazis... Given the havoc they willingly caused to nations worldwide, an international trial for Zuckerberg and the other responsibles does not seem so inconceivable to me... And that's not considering a lot of other probably less important things they did
    - cultureswitch 3y ago
      How did Facebook facilitate a genocide? Did they provide material support? Did they make an editorial decision to stoke genocidal messages? It doesn't appear any of that is the case. It appears Facebook was used as a tool of communication by people who wanted to commit a genocide. These people also used Android and Windows (and countless other products), which technically also could censor speech in their products. Why aren't you saying they should be put on trial too? Is your argument that Facebook as a whole is specifically engineered to incite tribal violence, and so should be banned on the same basis as radar scanners? Because in that case I think you have an argument to make which isn't completely incoherent.
kaycebasques 3y ago
> There are a lot of posts about Rohingya men raping, forcibly marrying, beating, and murdering Buddhist women. (That quote comes from the description of the mechanics of the military's coordinated propaganda campaign.) I would like to share a PSA in the truest sense of that acronym. I suggest building an automatic bullshit indicator in your brain whenever you see any content along the lines of "they're harming our women" from anyone. It may literally be the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Both sides used it extensively in WWI [1]. It pops up a lot in the history of American slavery / racism as the idea that often directly sparked lynchings. I'm sure you can think up lots of other examples. Sorry if this is already obvious but over the years I keep seeing more and more examples of it and IMO this tactic doesn't seem to be as well-known as the technique of depicting the victims as an infestation of animal pests. [1] Example of USA propaganda from WWI https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/committee-on-public-information/ https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/committee-on-public-...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blackoil 3y ago
  I was just now reading exactly similar posts on reddit for Hamas and Israel.
throwaway4good 3y ago
Is Facebook still allowed in Myanmar?
- alxmng 3y ago
  The military blocks Facebook (and Twitter), but everyone uses it via VPN (including members of the military). Online commerce is popular, and the majority of online commerce happens on Facebook with cash-on-delivery.
kaycebasques 3y ago
The discussion about how Meta purportedly twisted the content moderation discussions around 2020 was a revelation for me. This quote from Meta captures the alleged spin well: > We proactively detect 99 percent of the hate speech removed from Facebook in Myanmar If the accusation is correct, they are not saying that they capture 99% of all Myanmar hate speech on Facebook. I remember that the big news agencies reported it that way. Meta is actually saying "of the 5% that we do catch, 99% was caught automatically." The key phrasing is "99% of the hate speech removed".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- billjings 3y ago
  Oh, wow. In other words, this number actually means, "We do almost no non-automated detection of hate speech." Smart spin, huh...
  - sdwr 3y ago
    That's gross!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The author is playing word games. Author states facebooks has good estimates for amount of hate content. Then say 99% (of terrorist material) of an unknown amount. Do they have good estimates or is this an unknown amount?
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    The article cites Frances Haugen's whistleblower disclosures: > …we’re deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook. This is actually an optimistic estimate—previous (and more rigorous) iterations of this estimation exercise have put it closer to 3%, and on V&I [violence and incitement] we’re deleting somewhere around 0.6%…we miss 95% of violating hate speech. https://facebookpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Hate-speech_Redacted.pdf https://facebookpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Hate-s...
czhu12 3y ago
People have been quite good at committing genocide well before Facebook came around. I suspect even if Facebook didn't exist, the situation in Myanmar would not be materially improved.
mycologos 3y ago
OK, I spent ~an hour reading parts I [1], II [2], and III (TFA). My perception going in was that comment moderation is very hard, and essentially impossible at scale, and that Facebook/Meta cannot credibly be accused of literally causing genocide. Here is how my opinion shifted some after reading this series: The articles present a lot of evidence to support the notion that Facebook was well aware of clear-cut incitement to violence years before its escalation into large-scale genocide in late 2016. It isn't spelled out explicitly, but I think there are two things that make Facebook's initial apparent non-response easier to understand as incompetence rather than evil: * In the aftermath of the Arab spring, technology and social networks enjoyed a honeymoon in public perception that is hard to remember over a decade later. People, including (especially?) people in tech, could genuinely believe that making it easier for people to talk to each other was basically good, full stop. I'd suggest that this honeymoon only really ended after the 2016 US presidential election, which caused a lot of soul searching about information and echo chambers, and got even worse after the Cambridge Analytica scandal [3, this is a graph image from NBC news] * As part I of the article notes, "[t]he information landscape in Myanmar is so unstable that accounts of any given incident conflict, often in major ways". This dynamic seems to appear in a lot of places where well-off westerners interact with much poorer and more chaotic countries (Rwanda is a clear parallel). Part I points out that the "Burmese government" itself seems to make statements both fanning anger against the Rohingya and then trying to walk them back when it boils over into disorder So I think it was possible to be a basically well-intentioned (naive) Facebook employee in the leadup to 2016 and hear of strange, almost genocidal sounding posts in another language in a place you don't understand and still not think "this is a break-glass moment and I need to escalate and make a new path inside my corporation for this to be taken seriously". In hindsight, this was wrong, but I think we're forgetting that what happened next didn't seem possible, because we still thought of the internet as an exceptional new dawn in mass communication. A lot is necessary for people to process something as a novel, serious emergency. However, it's hard to maintain this judgment over the ensuing years, as senior figures at Facebook are repeatedly presented with evidence that people are deliberately distributing misinformation (e.g., making fake accounts, and other clear-cut evidence that doesn't require a fact checker and research) and mostly wave it away unless it's big enough to provoke media and investor consternation. By the end of the 2010s, I think Facebook was well past the "this sort of thing wasn't something we could imagine" stage of a crisis, and into a less defensible position along the lines of "this is reality, it cannot really be moderated, but we can pretend to moderate". One last point re: moderation, I have no idea how Meta hires its Burmese content moderators, but it must be tricky, since as far as I can tell most people in Burma are anti-Rohingya. I would like to be wrong about this, but what should be factually trustworthy sources like the Brookings institution write things like: > Most of the Myanmar population, especially the Buddhist majority, feels that the Rohingya don’t belong in their country ... [t]he straightforward solution would be to help the Rohingya return to their homes in Myanmar and live in peace and freedom. Sadly, this solution looks impossible in the near term because of the nationalist sentiment of the Buddhist majority [1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup [2] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis [3] https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f_auto,q_auto:eco,dpr_2.0/newscms/2018_16/2403241/n180418-facebook-trust.png https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f... [4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-myanmar-the-rohingya-crisis-and-a-clash-of-values/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-myanmar-...
sensanaty 3y ago
I'll preface this by saying the articles are of excellent quality, obviously well researched and to me an exemplary piece of research and journalism. With that being said, are we really supposed to be holding entities like Meta/Facebook accountable for the actions of governments? You can read through my comments here on HN and I'm sure you'll notice I'm not one to generally have nice or even neutral things to say about megacorp entities like Meta, but I just fail to see how any of this is really on them. If it wasn't Facebook where misinfo was being spread, it would've been twitter, or mastodon, or whatever other social media platform. And even if there were no social media platforms, disinformation, propaganda and unfortunately even genocides have all been happening for a lot longer than Meta's been a thing, and I seriously doubt that the lack of channels like Facebook would've prevented or even changed anything. Why are we suddenly deciding that Meta/Twitter/Google/Pick your poison are to be the arbiters and keepers of truth and justice?
- intended 3y ago
  The article explains it. They are being held responsible for their claims. For their product decisions. For their choices to ignore their own researchers. No one is “suddenly” anything. People have been crying out about this for a decade+. Please read the article. The answers are directly there.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  Besides what "intended" said, it's not likely at all that there would have been another analogous social network had Facebook not existed. It was them who first adopted most of the dynamics that lead to these things

212 points by joeyh 3y ago

3np 3y ago

Part I HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284

boomboomsubban 3y ago
And Part II https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728849

gmerc 3y ago

The Senate hearing was really the final confirmation anyone needed our elected representatives are woefully outmatched. Calling out the simple statistic slight of hand would have been a sure fire way of establishing control and the impression of hard on big tech they wanted. It was delivered on a platter. Instead of that we got “Senator we run ads” and stupid gotcha games trying to prove FB was biased against conservatives when it was painfully clear that Joel Kaplan had fully taken over the bias department in favor of his friends (preventing misinformation action on the news surface because, shocker, it came 90% from conservative staples like Drudge report)

goodbyesf 3y ago

[flagged]

yieldcrv 3y ago
This article uses Meta’s own definition, next question
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > This article uses Meta’s own definition, next question The definition meta was forced to adopt by the likes of the author. A nonsense definition. And it's not just meta, it's pretty much every american and european company was forced to adopt it. How amazing huh?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gmerc 3y ago
This article is well sourced, transparent about definitions and data. It’s a post child for high quality content. And you are rambling about propaganda, trying to move the question of the quality of reporting and data to “who is the author”, some casual whataboutism about “why don’t they do something else” and outright miss the point where the definition for hatespeech used is clearly the one Meta themselves defined. Then again your overall comment profile is just that, so if you want to make it about who is the author, you probably have to accept a “who are you”
coolbreezetft22 3y ago
> Isn't the problem in myanmar that we are trying to overthrow their government? What a ridiculous comment. Mynammar is in a civil war because their own people are trying to overthrow their government, which is oppressive and autocratic.
andrepd 3y ago
>Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc? What a wild take. "Nazism", "communism", and what is happening in Myanmar are three things with nothing in common whatsoever. What an absurd oversimplification. >Also, why is it always 'hate speech' when one side does it. It's not, my friend.
catlover76 3y ago
You're using a lot of words and terms you think make a point, and they aren't. There is no point in logically engaging with you. As you know, there is an actual genocide against Burmese Muslims by the Burmese government and large segments of its society. It's ongoing. You are pro-genocide. I don't even think you have anything against Burmese Muslims. I think people like you are moved to anger by others seeking to pursue good. Whoever the victim is, you have a disease of personality and spirit that causes you to attack attempts at sympathy or help towards them. Whatever the broader society or group values, you instinctively tear down. You think whenever someone wants to shed light on an injustice, you should shit on such an attempt mindlessly. Whenever someone wants to act altruistically, you want to make it seem like they aren't really being altruistic, that they must have some ulterior motive. Because you yourself aren't altruistic, and have no good, and don't care about the suffering of others. Why are you calling it propaganda? It's a well-documented article, whereas you spew stupidity. Who are you trying to fool by acting like the Burmese government is legitimate? Are a government like the North Korean one and the government that allows you to post the drivel you post freely alike? The rest of us needn't do anything but down vote you and avoid people like you in real life. It's not even a matter of understanding or misunderstanding something logically; you know that the government of Burma is genocidal and oppressive, you know that the government of Iran is oppressive and rising to ever new heights of brutality, etc, and you know that normal people rightly find that all wrong. But something inside you causes you to want to launch pathetic half-baked defenses of such evil in online posts. Something inside you is rotten and causes you to call a detailed post documenting a pretty evil paper trail from a major corporation--pretty stereotypically what we think good journalism should be, and which we get little of from most major publications--"propaganda".
rakoo 3y ago
I think you're mixing up "people in Myanmar" and "the Myanmar government". The post is primarily talking about the first one, and Facebook has had an effect on the first one. > Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc? Yes it is > So what erin wants is meta to serve as an anti-myanmar propaganda machine? What the author wants is that facebook doesn't propagate hate speech by putting it up in front just because it makes clicks and money. What the author wants is that when people report hate speech, facebook acts on it. What the author wants is to take on its responsibility as a facilitator to the genocide. > If she wants less suffering why doesn't she advocate that the UK, EU, US, etc stop trying to overthrow the government of myanmar? That's not the topic of the article. Please remain on topic. > It's funny because her article could be classified as hate speech by the people of myanmar. And why is this propaganda on HN? Everything is sourced. Not a single word in the articles calls for the hate of any people, not even Mark Zuckerberg. Please elaborate where you find hateful content.

jowea 3y ago

The previous parts do say that Facebook was not doing well even when it was just disorganized masses and some provocateurs, but I am the only one who feels it is weird that Facebook, a private company, is expect to "fight" state organizations? Is this consequence of free market capitalism really how the US should do things?

rakoo 3y ago
[flagged]
- logicchains 3y ago
  >without inciting a mass genocide The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook was just one of the communication mediums they used. >capitalism should be abolished Pretty rich saying this while commenting on Myanmar. Myanmar did abolish capitalism, that's why they have a communist government, and nobody has the power to stand up to the government because no capitalism == no private property. Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people in the government are allowed to own property", and on top of that constructing a violent state apparatus to destroy anyone who dares to acquire property of their own. You can't abolish capitalism without also having groups of armed men arresting or killing anyone who tries to open a shop, because violently intervening is the only way to stop two willing parties from trading with each other. And this is not exaggeration, it's literally what happened in China and Russia after the communist revolutions.
  - rakoo 3y ago
    > The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook was just one of the communication mediums they used. It's not about who did the genocide, it's about what was the role of Facebook in the genocide > Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people in the government are allowed to own property" As you said before, abolishing capitalism means abolishing private property. If the government has property, capitalism wasn't abolished; in fact, as what happened in USSR and China, capitalism wasn't abolished, it was only enabled for a different subset of the population. > and on top of that constructing a violent state apparatus to destroy anyone who dares to acquire property of their own. Surely you know about communist and socialist ideology and don't imply that a state is still necessary

arczyx 3y ago

So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose the latter, just as what we can expect from big corporations nowadays. Not an unexpected decision overall, but it did surprise me how low Facebook can stoop. Like, they didn't even bother to fix their stuff in Myanmar after all these years with Myanmar being the poster child of their hate speech problem! > In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta’s operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate speech aimed at the Rohingya—actual posts from the period of the genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings I’ve been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-language Facebook advertisements. > Meta accepted all eight ads.

cm2012 3y ago
I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar was in a civil war at all. (Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this).
- arczyx 3y ago
  > At worst its negligence According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed" is more appropriate. > Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and “foreign adversaries.”
  - cm2012 3y ago
    That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.

theptip 3y ago

> the most generous number from the disclosed memos has Meta removing 5% of hate speech on Facebook. That would mean that for every 2,000 hateful posts or comments, Meta removes about 100–95 automatically and 5 via user reports. Its really hard to contextualize these numbers. What are the comparable rates for other media? What % of hate speech on Mastodon is taken down? Twitter? YouTube? Discord? Comparing with old-school mob formation technology, what about leaflets handed out? Political rallies? Meta is an obvious target because they have such a high % of total online speech, and by virtue of this make a potentially impactful single intervention point to make things better. And these articles do make it seem they have room at the margin to improve. But imagine a word with multiple social networks per country - do we think they would be better or worse at policing this stuff (and crucially, the places where it matters are the developing less-regulated countries, often with governments that are at least disinterested in preventing the ethnic conflicts, if not actively promoting them)? I can see hand-wavey arguments in both directions but what I really want is data analyzing the question.

cultureswitch 3y ago
Less developed countries are typically more willing to and more abusive in controlling expression than more developed ones. That is by no means a rule though. The question, of course, is whether there is a political will to "police hate speech". In reality this already dubiously noble goal is as flexible as the definition of "terrorist organisation".
arczyx 3y ago
Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way more than 5%), and then decided to rollback it. > And this method works. In Myanmar, “reshare depth demotion” reduced “viral inflammatory prevalence” by 25% and cut “photo misinformation” almost in half. > In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were over.
- 3y ago

photochemsyn 3y ago

This series is an interesting view into Meta's internal policies - but historically it lacks a great of context and doesn't explain the roots of the conflict that led to the mass exodus of Rohingya people from Myanmar - in fact the author is almost entirely silent on a key issue that exacerbated the situation: Saudi-Pakistani efforts to run a regime change operation based in the Rohingya region. See Reuters, 2016: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmars-rohingya-insurgency-has-links-to-saudi-pakistan-report-idUSKBN1450Y7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmars... > "“Though not confirmed, there are indications he went to Pakistan and possibly elsewhere, and that he received practical training in modern guerrilla warfare,” the group said. It noted that Ata Ullah was one of 20 Rohingya from Saudi Arabia leading the group’s operations in Rakhine State. Separately, a committee of 20 senior Rohingya emigres oversees the group, which has headquarters in Mecca, the ICG said." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataullah_abu_Ammar_Jununi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataullah_abu_Ammar_Jununi That certainly doesn't justify the response of the Myanmar government, but it helps explain it to some degree - imagine the US political response if, say, US border facilities were attacked by an Iran-based group that killed a dozen US border guards. Entirely neglecting this background is just bad journalism, and also distorts the role of Meta. It's highly unlikely, given this information, that a rigorous censorship strategy on Meta would have changed the outcome much if at all. A more rational conclusion is that the Myanmar government viewed the Rohingya people as a potential base for Saudi/Pakistani-backed terror groups to launch attacks within Myanmar, and that was the root cause of the expulsion, and that social media-based propaganda efforts were not that important in understanding what happened. I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity.

g-b-r 3y ago
> I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship At issue here is the PROMOTION of misinformation, lies and genocidal speech (in users' feeds), not the fact that they haven't deleted it.
p_j_w 3y ago
> I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity. Demonstrating that fact is a really poor substitute for taking some kind of action against an ongoing genocide.

g-b-r 3y ago

We need a Nuremberg trial for Facebook (without the death sentences, which I don't support for anyone)

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gizmo385 3y ago
What exactly is the target of the comparison here? Facebooks existence? Its behavior? And whatever that thing is, to be clear, you are comparing it to the crimes against humanity committed by the nazis during world war 2? Regardless of whether you like or dislike Facebook, that comparison seems patently absurd.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  It for example faciliated a genocide, the rise or confirmation of authoritarian and bloody regimes, and kept consciously doing it if you read the article. The reference to Nuremberg was more for an example of an international trial than for the nazis, although faciliting a smaller scale genocide does somehow seem to have a relationship with the nazis... Given the havoc they willingly caused to nations worldwide, an international trial for Zuckerberg and the other responsibles does not seem so inconceivable to me... And that's not considering a lot of other probably less important things they did
  - cultureswitch 3y ago
    How did Facebook facilitate a genocide? Did they provide material support? Did they make an editorial decision to stoke genocidal messages? It doesn't appear any of that is the case. It appears Facebook was used as a tool of communication by people who wanted to commit a genocide. These people also used Android and Windows (and countless other products), which technically also could censor speech in their products. Why aren't you saying they should be put on trial too? Is your argument that Facebook as a whole is specifically engineered to incite tribal violence, and so should be banned on the same basis as radar scanners? Because in that case I think you have an argument to make which isn't completely incoherent.

kaycebasques 3y ago

> There are a lot of posts about Rohingya men raping, forcibly marrying, beating, and murdering Buddhist women. (That quote comes from the description of the mechanics of the military's coordinated propaganda campaign.) I would like to share a PSA in the truest sense of that acronym. I suggest building an automatic bullshit indicator in your brain whenever you see any content along the lines of "they're harming our women" from anyone. It may literally be the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Both sides used it extensively in WWI [1]. It pops up a lot in the history of American slavery / racism as the idea that often directly sparked lynchings. I'm sure you can think up lots of other examples. Sorry if this is already obvious but over the years I keep seeing more and more examples of it and IMO this tactic doesn't seem to be as well-known as the technique of depicting the victims as an infestation of animal pests. [1] Example of USA propaganda from WWI https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/committee-on-public-information/ https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/committee-on-public-...

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blackoil 3y ago
I was just now reading exactly similar posts on reddit for Hamas and Israel.

throwaway4good 3y ago

Is Facebook still allowed in Myanmar?

alxmng 3y ago
The military blocks Facebook (and Twitter), but everyone uses it via VPN (including members of the military). Online commerce is popular, and the majority of online commerce happens on Facebook with cash-on-delivery.

kaycebasques 3y ago

The discussion about how Meta purportedly twisted the content moderation discussions around 2020 was a revelation for me. This quote from Meta captures the alleged spin well: > We proactively detect 99 percent of the hate speech removed from Facebook in Myanmar If the accusation is correct, they are not saying that they capture 99% of all Myanmar hate speech on Facebook. I remember that the big news agencies reported it that way. Meta is actually saying "of the 5% that we do catch, 99% was caught automatically." The key phrasing is "99% of the hate speech removed".

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billjings 3y ago
Oh, wow. In other words, this number actually means, "We do almost no non-automated detection of hate speech." Smart spin, huh...
- sdwr 3y ago
  That's gross!
- deleted 3y ago
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ipaddr 3y ago
The author is playing word games. Author states facebooks has good estimates for amount of hate content. Then say 99% (of terrorist material) of an unknown amount. Do they have good estimates or is this an unknown amount?
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  The article cites Frances Haugen's whistleblower disclosures: > …we’re deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook. This is actually an optimistic estimate—previous (and more rigorous) iterations of this estimation exercise have put it closer to 3%, and on V&I [violence and incitement] we’re deleting somewhere around 0.6%…we miss 95% of violating hate speech. https://facebookpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Hate-speech_Redacted.pdf https://facebookpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Hate-s...

czhu12 3y ago

People have been quite good at committing genocide well before Facebook came around. I suspect even if Facebook didn't exist, the situation in Myanmar would not be materially improved.

mycologos 3y ago

OK, I spent ~an hour reading parts I [1], II [2], and III (TFA). My perception going in was that comment moderation is very hard, and essentially impossible at scale, and that Facebook/Meta cannot credibly be accused of literally causing genocide. Here is how my opinion shifted some after reading this series: The articles present a lot of evidence to support the notion that Facebook was well aware of clear-cut incitement to violence years before its escalation into large-scale genocide in late 2016. It isn't spelled out explicitly, but I think there are two things that make Facebook's initial apparent non-response easier to understand as incompetence rather than evil: * In the aftermath of the Arab spring, technology and social networks enjoyed a honeymoon in public perception that is hard to remember over a decade later. People, including (especially?) people in tech, could genuinely believe that making it easier for people to talk to each other was basically good, full stop. I'd suggest that this honeymoon only really ended after the 2016 US presidential election, which caused a lot of soul searching about information and echo chambers, and got even worse after the Cambridge Analytica scandal [3, this is a graph image from NBC news] * As part I of the article notes, "[t]he information landscape in Myanmar is so unstable that accounts of any given incident conflict, often in major ways". This dynamic seems to appear in a lot of places where well-off westerners interact with much poorer and more chaotic countries (Rwanda is a clear parallel). Part I points out that the "Burmese government" itself seems to make statements both fanning anger against the Rohingya and then trying to walk them back when it boils over into disorder So I think it was possible to be a basically well-intentioned (naive) Facebook employee in the leadup to 2016 and hear of strange, almost genocidal sounding posts in another language in a place you don't understand and still not think "this is a break-glass moment and I need to escalate and make a new path inside my corporation for this to be taken seriously". In hindsight, this was wrong, but I think we're forgetting that what happened next didn't seem possible, because we still thought of the internet as an exceptional new dawn in mass communication. A lot is necessary for people to process something as a novel, serious emergency. However, it's hard to maintain this judgment over the ensuing years, as senior figures at Facebook are repeatedly presented with evidence that people are deliberately distributing misinformation (e.g., making fake accounts, and other clear-cut evidence that doesn't require a fact checker and research) and mostly wave it away unless it's big enough to provoke media and investor consternation. By the end of the 2010s, I think Facebook was well past the "this sort of thing wasn't something we could imagine" stage of a crisis, and into a less defensible position along the lines of "this is reality, it cannot really be moderated, but we can pretend to moderate". One last point re: moderation, I have no idea how Meta hires its Burmese content moderators, but it must be tricky, since as far as I can tell most people in Burma are anti-Rohingya. I would like to be wrong about this, but what should be factually trustworthy sources like the Brookings institution write things like: > Most of the Myanmar population, especially the Buddhist majority, feels that the Rohingya don’t belong in their country ... [t]he straightforward solution would be to help the Rohingya return to their homes in Myanmar and live in peace and freedom. Sadly, this solution looks impossible in the near term because of the nationalist sentiment of the Buddhist majority [1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup [2] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis [3] https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f_auto,q_auto:eco,dpr_2.0/newscms/2018_16/2403241/n180418-facebook-trust.png https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f... [4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-myanmar-the-rohingya-crisis-and-a-clash-of-values/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-myanmar-...

sensanaty 3y ago

I'll preface this by saying the articles are of excellent quality, obviously well researched and to me an exemplary piece of research and journalism. With that being said, are we really supposed to be holding entities like Meta/Facebook accountable for the actions of governments? You can read through my comments here on HN and I'm sure you'll notice I'm not one to generally have nice or even neutral things to say about megacorp entities like Meta, but I just fail to see how any of this is really on them. If it wasn't Facebook where misinfo was being spread, it would've been twitter, or mastodon, or whatever other social media platform. And even if there were no social media platforms, disinformation, propaganda and unfortunately even genocides have all been happening for a lot longer than Meta's been a thing, and I seriously doubt that the lack of channels like Facebook would've prevented or even changed anything. Why are we suddenly deciding that Meta/Twitter/Google/Pick your poison are to be the arbiters and keepers of truth and justice?

intended 3y ago
The article explains it. They are being held responsible for their claims. For their product decisions. For their choices to ignore their own researchers. No one is “suddenly” anything. People have been crying out about this for a decade+. Please read the article. The answers are directly there.
g-b-r 3y ago
Besides what "intended" said, it's not likely at all that there would have been another analogous social network had Facebook not existed. It was them who first adopted most of the dynamics that lead to these things