Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar

Facebook's original post here https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/

HN Discussion about the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18387876

Well timed by FB PR to release on the eve of one of the biggest news days of the past 2 years.

> In response to a question about the timing of the release of the report, Facebook said it had previously committed to publishing the report at this time.

What a great excuse!

If you have the time, I would highly recommend watching the PBS documentary about all this:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

Really helps to put it all into context.

Facebook's response here is pretty galling. They are admitting (barely) they were complicit in crimes against humanity and yet the wording they use and their commitment to action is at about the same level as if they experienced an hour of unintended downtime or used the wrong font for a couple days or something equally trivial.

This right here is a perfect example of the banality of evil. Facebook bears a huge responsibility in helping to facility a horrific crime, and yet they are treating it as some sort of boring bureaucratic snafu. They aren't even accepting responsibility, they are just brushing it off in a typical "mistakes were made" fashion. This is appalling. Facebook should be ashamed. Everybody who works at Facebook or holds Facebook stock should be ashamed.

If violence is organized through a phone call, is that the fault of the phone manufacturer or the phone service provider? If violence is organized through the use of protest signs, is that the fault of cardboard and marker manufacturers? Heck, why not just go a step further and say that it's the fault of "language" and ban all forms of that.

Ironically, when someone goes and shoots up a school... we defend the gun manufacturers as simply producers of a tool. I see, but Facebook, which is clearly just a tool for communication, is surely at fault here. I don't get people.

Facebook (organization) admits Facebook (service) was used, etc. Conflating those things doesn't help.

I hope this is a step in the right direction but the comments from the executive that are quoted in the article suggest that it is not.

He is very stoic about Facebook's role in all of this and describes the platform as "just a product". His claim that, in the absence of Facebook, some other platform would have been used to do the same thing is indefensible. Facebook makes sure that every Android phone in the world comes with Facebook pre-installed and ideally in such a way that it cannot be uninstalled. That is why this happened on Facebook instead of Reddit or any other social platform. Facebook moved fast and helped commit genocide. "Whoops, I guess we'll try to fix it." Is how the company responds to every lapse of judgement and good sense. In the company's view every daily active user is a win for Facebook and the users are not owed anything whatsoever.