Complacency (Click for more details) (jan 1, 2016 – dec 31, 2017)

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By 2016, with the 2015 elections safely behind us, Facebook became complacent. By then, they had Burmese language community standards, a localized reporting tool, a few Burmese language videos on online bullying and hate speech, and direct links to civil society partners who could escalate high risk and emergency issues to their attention. They seemed to think that they had fulfilled their safety requirements towards their Myanmar users - and started to shift their focus towards monetizing their business in the country. In January 2016, Facebook met with Myanmar media and marketing agencies in Yangon, Myanmar, to pitch their publisher program - instant article - which positions Facebook as an intermediary between advertisers and publishers. The program was eventually rolled out in April 2016. In May 2016, Facebook also launched Free Basics and Facebook FLEX in partnership with Myanmar’s state owned telecom provider MPT. We were not briefed nor consulted on the risks associated with the introduction of either of these services, and it’s unclear that Facebook ever did a human rights impact assessment.

As the situation of the Rohingya quickly deteriorated in October 2016, Facebook was unequipped to proactively address risk concerns. They relied nearly exclusively on us, as local partners, to point them to problematic content. Upon receiving our escalations, which were made over a mix of emails, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Group, WhatsApp or Skype, they would typically address the copy we escalated but take no further steps to remove duplicate copies or address the systemic policy or enforcement gaps that these escalations brought to light. The time it took to address escalations also varied greatly, with evening escalations (most frequent), subject to the greatest delays, as Australia - where the Myanmar market was managed from - was asleep. We kept asking for more points of contact, better escalation protocols, and interlocutors with knowledge of the language and context who could make decisions on the violations without requiring the need for translators and further delays. We got none of that. When we met with the manager in charge of escalations, upon his visit to Yangon in June 2017, we were told that our best bet was to report using the user reporting tool in parallel to our escalations as reports submitted through that tool, he claimed, were being reviewed within an average of 6 hours. That obviously wasn’t true. Our own data later showed that the median turnaround time on a report, when a review took place, was closer to 48 hours. Facebook had no Burmese language classifiers at the time either, which could have helped triage and prioritize reports.

Despite the escalating risks, we did not see much progress over that period, and Facebook was just as unequipped to deal with the escalation of anti-Rohingya rhetoric and violence in August 2017 as they had been in 2016. They had made some attempt at leveraging automated moderation using slur lists in early 2017, but this hadn’t been compelling. Ultimately, it was still down to us, as local partners, to warn them. We simply couldn’t cope with the scale. On 9 September 2017, Victoire Rio, then Social Impact Director at Phandeeyar, warned in an email that a Facebook Messenger campaign had the potential to trigger countrywide violence. Her warning couldn’t have been more explicit. She barely got a response. In fact, it wasn’t until December 2017, when Facebook first visited the country past the events, that she was told that her warnings had made it to Mark Zuckerberg. In spite of the explicit warning, there was no apparent attempt at addressing the broader risk concerns in the months that followed the attacks. Mark Zuckerberg later referred to this period as a success, claiming that their ‘systems’ had successfully prevented violence. We called him out in an open letter in April 2018, prompting a formal apology.

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