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.
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).
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.
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.
I'm not blaming the entire ethnic conflict on Facebook. I'm saying Facebook made it worse and, through reckless neglect, contributed to deaths of people that otherwise wouldn't have died.
It's ridiculous to blame a decades long ethnic conflict that already had established routes of propaganda through the state on Facebook. You can also see no noticeable increase in violence correlating with internet access.
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.
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...
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 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?
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.
As tempting as it is to believe this story's premise that Facebook is bullying?/neglecting? smaller countries and then fit that into the larger backlash against social media, I think it's very misleading to believe that actually applies in Sri Lanka's case.
In fact, Sri Lanka has a history of majoritarian ethnic violence, up to and including genocide, against ethnic nationalities and minorities within the country.
Sinhalese also committed organized violence against Muslims in 1915. There were riots in 1958 because Tamils protested the use of the Sinhalese on license plates (following 1956 when Sinhalese replaced English as the only official language of govt, disenfrachising all Tamil govt employees). Tamils were killed in 1974 at the international Tamil conference in Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital. And of course, the official war between 1983 - 2009 was one drawn-out genocide against Tamils by the 99% Sinhalese military and 95% Sinhalese police force, "ignited" by Sinhalese "mobs" using govt voter lists to burn Tamil homes and business along with killing Tamils, while the police were deployed everywhere but stood by and watched.
I get the tech-relevance of Facebook here, but this story is trying to take the latest ethnic atrocity from country that's already systemically racist, and somehow shoehorn it into the larger narrative of social media, corruption, and politics.
Maybe this is Sri Lanka's attempt at distancing itself from the Cambridge Analytica exposé that Channel 4 did undercover, where they posed as a middleman working to swing the recent SL local elections in the favor of an opposition chauvinist strongman who oversaw the crescendo of genocide against Tamils in 2009 (https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-...)
I find the Sri Lankan government a very unsympathetic, persistent, complicit actor in the violence within its borders. It's not like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were around to cause all the racist violence since 1915.
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.
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.
I've no horse in the game, but it sounds like you have a pet hatred towards Facebook, to the extent that you don't seem to realize that there's a difference between "facebook was used as a tool in an undesirable way by people with ill intent" (similar to how Parler was used by a specific segment of the voter base around the last US presidential election) vs the much more farfetched "facebook employees deliberately rigged the system somehow to promote violence in myanman and anyone that could be remotely perceived to be siding with FB must be shilling for it" conspiracy theory. It's an entirely reasonable position to shake one's head at the media's portrayal of a political instability through a interwebz-colored lens, but also dislike what did happen in the FB platform as a result of the simple fact that people involved in the conflict happen to use the internet.
The point your parent poster is making is that sensationalism and the easily outraged tend to ignore the nuance between unintended butterfly effect consequences that are hard to prevent vs deliberate malice by the company itself for its own profit.
It's a good idea to reflect a bit on hatred to see if it's really warranted. It's very easy to think "oh look at all these negative things I heard, facebook should shut down". What's hard is to realize that what you read online and your mental categorization of things doesn't always neatly mirror reality accurately. Nobody thinks we should ban chocolate on the grounds that violent people eat it and the rest of us would still have food even if chocolate was gone; we only get molded to think this way about things like Facebook because of media narratives.
Social media is very scary if you don't look only at the relatively educated western populations. Easy way to spread and amplify plausible sounding lies with little correction or oversight in third world countries, where people don't understand the context of what social media is or how it is different from normal media, how it all works, how easy is to photoshop stuff for pretty much anyone... It's troublesome.
Even some officials in UN are fearful of Facebook inspired genocide these days. Rwanda was radio telling people to go killing the Other. Now it is Facebook in some countries. Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India,...
The difference compared to radio is that it should be possible to prevent incitement to kill/hurt people for Facebook operators even if it would mean shutting it down in particular country, so there's culpability of the Facebook co. Facebook is not just a dumb pipe, they clearly police the content.
One day we may wake up to a reality of tens of thousands massacred muslims (or whoever) after people take it to the streets after some particularly successful hate week going viral on Facebook. As of today the riots are so far localised.
https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
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.
reply