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Comment by jacksnipe | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about better, but I'm concerned about a second Rohingya genocide.

There was a lot wrong with Facebook's moderation system. Spend any time in any politically active groups -- or groups that like to discuss politics -- and you'll quickly find people complaining about deranking. Based on both the extreme frequency with which it's reported and my own experiences with Meta, I believe that they're not making it up.

But Meta's moderation tools don't primarily exist -- as I understand it -- to keep discourse informative. They exist so that Meta doesn't accidentally become somewhat responsible for another genocide.

I think that community notes may be a better move for public discourse, but most conversations on Facebook itself happen in groups, and in groups nobody is going to be posting Community Notes that go against the trend of the group -- even if they might be useful for totally public discourse.

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I tend to blame the people actually doing the genocide for genocide, rather than a social media network. Ultimately I think one can clearly draw the line for personal responsibility well before literal murder.

Tens of thousands of have been raped, entire towns have been destroyed, around 50k killed and 700k forced to flee.

If Western countries actually cared about the human cost of this genocide, it would be almost a trivial matter to stop it overnight with a few well placed missiles against Myanmar's military, which continues to perpetrate the genocide even today.

Instead, no real action is taken and it's just a talking point for "Facebook bad." Blaming Facebook for a genocide is like blaming videogames for an active mass shooter w/o actually doing anything to stop them.

We can look at precedent here. RTLM's involvement in the Rwandan genocide for example would be a good place to start. There's a pretty explicit connection between the radio propaganda (RTLM furthered the Hutu Power ideology) and the actual violence. We should be able to draw a distinction between Jack Thompson and Tipper Gore fearmongering versus explicitly violent rhetoric designed to dehumanize people and promote the eradication of those people.

The actions taken by the US in response to the genocide in Myanmar were largely economic because, I would think, their proximity to China. Can't imagine direct intervention would have gone smoothly.

For the record, I don't think our response in Myanmar or Rwanda were good, not trying to dispute or downplay that.

How convenient it would be for the social media network if people tended not to blame them. I just watched Zuckerberg say that he's glad about the "free expression" that could happen because of Facebook, and these genocidal posts getting boosted by the algorithm are an example of this. What is missing on Facebook is actual free expression, of people seeing posts from people they follow, including small business owners who would like to reach their customers.

Eh, I don't think that lens is useful. It appears to me that the genocide very likely may not have occurred -- and certainly would have harmed fewer people -- if Facebook didn't exist.

It is not simply a matter of it happening elsewhere on the internet -- Myanmar is one of the countries that Facebook provided its Free Basics package to.

Of course, I think the bulk of the blame lays on those actively perpetrating the genocide. But I'm concerned mostly with outcomes, and it seems that with different behavior from Facebook, there would have been a different outcome in Myanmar.

The genocide also wouldn't have occurred if the internet wasn't available, or if air/water didn't exist, etc

I think blaming the medium for communication is a bit silly. That is just the substrate. The responsibility solely lies with the murderers.

I don't think abdicating responsibility for the consequences of technology you create is a sustainable system of ethics, but I also understand why you feel the way you do and where you're coming from. (I'm not throwing shade, we just have very different systems of ethics.)

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