Facebook basically fueled a genocide in Myanmar and extreme violence in other places. The whole fake news thing we went through in 2016 was pioneered by Russia to annex Ukraine. Facebook was warned about these behaviors repeatedly by government and watchdog organizations and apparently did nothing to curtail them. So Facebook is this great tool to stay connected to people but at the same time it has been hijacked to cause real harm.
Facebook basically fueled a genocide in Myanmar and extreme violence in other places.
If we widen the definition slightly to include other social media firms then the most recent phase of chaos in the Middle East (post "Arab Spring") and the rise of ISIS can directly be blamed on FB and Twitter.
Is it hyperbole to say that Facebook helped enable genocide in Myanmar? Or that it has been an incredibly useful tool for political propaganda, more so than traditional media ever was?
They have not done anything to meaningfully address the very real issues their platform has, and are forging ahead regardless to become even more ubiquitous. The negativity is very understandable.
People lead to violence, FB is an internet tool. E.g. in Myanmar FB is used to plan genocide, in Germany, they didn’t need FB 90 years ago to do the same.
This society is full of awful things. It seems strange to me that people single-out Facebook in comparison to whatever other forces exist out there.
I think the single worst thing Facebook was documented as being involved was genocide in Myanmar, which was indeed certainly terrible. And while FB's poor policies are no doubt partly to blame here (obviously, blood on their hands), the people who actually did it, the state that aided etc, are likely more to blame. And similar horrors have been committed in other regions through mass hysteria instead spread through email or text messages (pogroms against strangers in India, etc).
Which is to say that Facebook has many terrible qualities and I'd love people to come together in the kind of social network I want instead, but still, I can't see much or any unique evil in Facebook compared to many systems and processes that it just happens to a part (choose from media, capitalist, elites, whatever).
Bingo. So what's wrong with that? Take what happened in Myanmar for example. The government was using Facebook to commit genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook could have just turned it off in that country. At some point Facebook should just turn itself off. The leaks allege that insiders at Facebook have more or less argued the exact same thing: turn off or greatly tone down profitable features like groups that are routinely misused.
It's true that the Facebook app or company didn't suddenly kill them. But my claim was very specific ("Misinformation spread on Facebook led to the genocide in Myanmar") and well backed up by the evidence.
It's the same as the role Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) played during the Rwandan genocide.
Facebook is even worse in other countries, where they promote outrage algorithmically then don't hire any moderators to even try and keep it in check. This way they're implicated in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...
If Facebook was warned since 2013 that they're a conduit for genocide and give exactly zero fucks unless it becomes a PR problem four years later then, well, I would call them a festering, evil karbunkel of a problem.
Facebook is directly responsible for mass murder (not only in Myanmar, but feel free to look up Sri Lanke, The Philippines, Cambodia and probably a few other countries).
The "Well, Facebook is only a medium and those evil folks could have performed their genocide with the help of postcards" excuse really doesn't cut it.
They knew for years and didn't do shit! Let that sink in...
I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. It was kept in check by an authoritarian military dictatorship and then bubbled up in the transition to more democracy, which really shouldn't have been unexpected. Facebook was just there at the wrong time, and happened to be the way people were communicating at that time; Aung San Suu Kyi has also gotten a lot of criticism for being in this even though she has been mostly powerless to do anything about it either.
All Facebook can do is stop the propagation on their network. Even with China-level censorship, they would probably need serious manual effort or even a complete network shutdown to stop being a medium. But the same problems will still occur using other channels, maybe the hate won't move as fast, but it will still be fast enough to cause plenty of damage.
Just look at what the facebook algorithm is doing. By optimizing for engagement it is pushing outrage-generating content turning people against each other.
800,000 people in Myanmar have been displaced because they had to flee their country. All driven by the Myanmar military posting false information on facebook.
Facebook's AI doesn't hate Muslims, but it is responsible for at least million refugees.
Now look at what is happening with polarization in countries all around the world. In the USA, Canada, everywhere.
Skynet isn't going to send a bunch of robots to terminate us, it's going to manipulate our media and convince us to terminate each other... and unless something changes skynet is probably facebook.
In much of South/South-East Asia, for many people, Facebook is the internet. (And remember Facebook Zero? Facebook was aware of and tried to engender this).
A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every way -- be it be providing a captive audience for authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for surveillance states to collect and build models to control humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.
Facebook is also specifically used in countries to rally violence against ethnic minorities. As in literally assisting genocide. Looking at it with rose colored glasses is missing a lot of the point.
In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been?
Sure you can replace Facebook with whatever you want and come up with some scenario that will lead to a genocide. I bet this genocide would happen at some point regardless of facebooks involvement. There have been plenty before it. But the fact of the matter here is that in this case it _was_ facebook.
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