Twenty-Three Thousand Pills That Never Existed
In early 2018, a false claim that spread on Facebook helped ignite anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka that left at least three people dead. Two years later, Facebook apologized for what it called the “very real human rights impacts” that followed.
A rumor about pills
The story that circulated on Facebook in February 2018 was specific and false. It claimed that police had seized 23,000 sterilization pills from a Muslim pharmacist in the eastern Sri Lankan town of Ampara, offered as proof of an alleged plot by Muslims to sterilize the country's Sinhalese-speaking Buddhist majority. The sequence of events was detailed in a report by The New York Times, summarized by Fortune.
According to that account, the rumor helped send a mob to a Muslim-owned restaurant in Ampara, where patrons falsely claimed the food had been laced to cause infertility. A language barrier between the Sinhalese customer and the restaurant's Muslim staff made the accusation impossible to defuse. The mob beat a worker, wrecked the shop and set fire to a nearby mosque.
Sri Lankan authorities found no pills. On 8 March 2018, the country's Department of the Government Analyst determined that the particles alleged to be sterilization tablets were carbohydrate-based clumps of flour, according to a contemporaneous account compiled by Wikipedia's cited record of the riots.
From a post to the streets
The Ampara incident was part of a wider wave of religiously motivated violence that spread through central Sri Lanka in early 2018, whipped up in part on social media. At least three people were killed and 20 injured, and mosques and Muslim businesses were burned, mainly in the Sinhalese Buddhist-majority center of the country, Al Jazeera reported. The government declared a state of emergency and temporarily blocked access to Facebook.
Sri Lanka was, at the time, a country where Facebook functioned for many users as the primary gateway to the internet. Researchers and rights groups had warned the company for years that its platform was being used to spread anti-Muslim content, warnings that reporting later found had gone largely unheeded before the 2018 unrest.
What Facebook conceded
Facebook itself had limited capacity to police posts in Sinhala. The company had “only two resource persons” reviewing content in the language before the unrest, according to Al Jazeera's account of the violence and its aftermath.
The company later commissioned an independent human-rights assessment of its role. When the findings were released in May 2020, Facebook told Bloomberg News: “We deplore the misuse of our platform. We recognise, and apologise for, the very real human rights impacts that resulted,” Al Jazeera reported. The company said it had since hired more staff, including Sinhala speakers, and begun using detection technology to protect vulnerable groups.
Investigators concluded that incendiary content on the platform may have led to offline violence, and that the company had failed for years to remove such material. The case has since been cited alongside other episodes in which unchecked online incitement preceded real-world attacks — and in which the pace of moderation lagged far behind the speed at which a fabricated claim could travel.