The Genocide Facebook Helped Broadcast

Before Myanmar's army drove more than 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh in the autumn of 2017, the ground had already been prepared, and much of the preparing happened on Facebook. In a country where the app is, for many people, the whole of the internet, pages and accounts — some of them run by the military itself — had spent years describing Rohingya Muslims as invaders, as vermin, as a threat that had to be dealt with. By the time soldiers were burning villages, the language of the killing was already familiar. People had been reading it for a long time.

What is unusual about this case is not the hatred. It is that the record of the platform's part in it is not a matter of opinion or activist framing. It sits in the findings of a United Nations mission and of the world's largest human-rights organizations, in their own words.

In March 2018, the chair of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Marzuki Darusman, told reporters that social media had played a “determining role” in the country. Facebook, he said, had “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict” among the public (Reuters, via NBC News; Al Jazeera). The same mission recommended that Myanmar's senior generals be investigated and prosecuted for genocide. This was not a warning about what might happen. It was a post-mortem.

You could still read that as a story about bad people posting bad things, with the platform an innocent bystander that simply happened to be where they gathered. The more uncomfortable finding is that the platform was not neutral. In September 2022 Amnesty International published “The Social Atrocity,” and its Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, did not hedge: “In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook's algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence.” Not hosting the storm. Intensifying it. The systems that decide what you see next had learned that outrage travels, and they fed it.

Meta did not entirely dispute this. The company commissioned its own independent human-rights assessment, which concluded it had not done enough, and it has acknowledged being too slow to act in Myanmar. That is a strange sentence to be able to write about a trillion-dollar company and a genocide, and it is worth sitting with. The problem was never that no one raised the alarm. Civil-society groups in Myanmar had been begging Facebook to take the hate seriously for years. The alarms were simply louder than the response.

There is a reason this keeps happening, and it is not cartoon villainy. A feed ranked by engagement rewards whatever holds attention, and few things hold attention like contempt for a named enemy. Asking a company to suppress that is asking it to fight the exact thing its business is tuned to reward, every quarter, in dozens of languages it never properly staffed. Most serious people who study this conclude that the real fix is binding regulation. The awkward politics are that regulation is slow, contested, watered down, and always a step behind the next platform.

So there is a gap. The harm moves at the speed of a share; the remedy moves at the speed of a law. Something has to live in that gap, and for now that something is mostly us. Editors decide who gets a byline. Employers decide who speaks for them. Festival bookers, coaches, congregations and ordinary people decide, a hundred times a day, whose voice they pass along and whose they report. None of that is a substitute for the law. But it is the accountability the platforms have shown they will not impose on themselves, and it is available now, to people who are paying attention.

That is the whole argument behind this publication, and behind the company that pays for it, so we will not pretend to be neutral about it: we think a lot of the work has to be done from outside the platforms, by people willing to look at what someone actually says in public and respond to it. What we would ask of you here is smaller and older than any product. When something in your feed is designed to make a person or a people seem less than human, notice it. Refuse to pass it on. And where you can, hold the people who profit from it to the standard they refuse to hold themselves.