Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

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If you read contemporary reporting about anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-buddhis... you may learn that there were Buddhist monks traveling the country, giving sermons to crowds of thousands of people, telling them to treat Muslims as enemies, and stickers being used to visibly signal alignment with the movement.

Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.

In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.

The internet and the real world don't exist in separate vacuums. Internet communication and amplification of hate speech helped create an environment where hateful sermons were planned and popularized, and vice-versa.

Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.

You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.

Reach is indeed important. But the internet is not the only way to generate reach, nor necessarily the most effective one. During the riots in 2012 and 2013, 2% of the population were using the internet https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... and there were 14 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?location... Meanwhile, a traveling monk wanting to hold a sermon about the importance of shunning Muslims could rely on the local religious community to deliver him an audience, and on word of mouth, flyers and posters to inform everyone who didn't attend.

That's not the full story. A few quotes from Amnesty International's report:

> Even before internet access became widely available in Myanmar, Facebook was already the dominant platform in the country.

> In 2011, despite widespread restrictions on internet access, it was estimated that approximately 80% of Myanmar's few internet users had Facebook accounts.

> By 2014, Facebook was estimated to have had hundreds of thousands of users in Myanmar, many of whom were accessing the platform through internet cafes or devices belonging to their friends or family members.

> Prior to 2015, Facebook was only available in Myanmar via an English-language interface, but a specific Myanmar version was launched in 2015.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in a country of 50 million works out to less than 2%. It's the same story. The Amnesty report does not strike me as starting from specific instances of mob violence and working backwards to determine the source of radicalization in each case. (And of course the later military campaign against Rohingya villages that they mostly focus on was not mob violence at all.) Instead, they work forward from the information leaked out of Facebook, which of course comes with a Facebook-centric worldview.

They would just run everything through machine translation and throw African labor at moderating it. There's no way they hire moderators locally. Or probably they just let LLM/Jev/Laya handle it nowadays.

And so, the standards of moderation will be increasingly more inconsistent and chaotic as cultural distances between the company HQ in US to the poster of a particular content increases - I see people complaining about food pics getting flagged as pornography in Japanese all the time.

I can't imagine how random the moderation infra will respond to: anti-Muslim propaganda briefs created by violent fundamentalist Buddhism terrorism groups circulated in the minority inhabited contested forested border areas of Myanmar. That description alone sounds Neuromancer enough to that the system might just fail open, before it digests the content and likewise fail open.

Good points. Also, thanks for the Reuters link. Buddhists as a group have for centuries been (fairly) associated with peace and nonviolence. The situation in Myanmar is a tragic anomaly. The article you shared sheds at least a bit of light on it:

> Relishing his extremist reputation, Wirathu describes himself as the "Burmese bin Laden."

Wirathu is clearly a sociopath -- and the furthest thing from a real Buddhist. If only people weren't so easily led by those who use religion as a means of control....

Facebook's direct culpability in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar had already been well-known and thoroughly reported on many years before Careless People.

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