Facebook’s response Absentee landlord

Facebook has been referred to as an “absentee landlord” in the context of Myanmar (Roose and Mozur 2018). Despite repeated warnings around the abuse and weaponisation of its platform, starting in 2012, the company did not visit the country until 2014. It first visited on the invitation of the Myanmar government, which invited Facebook to participate in a roundtable discussion following deadly riots in Mandalay which had been triggered by a Facebook rumour. According to Wired (Ortiz and Rafanan 2018), the government sought Facebook’s support during the situation but was not able to make contact and proceeded with shutting down the platform altogether. From this visit onward, the company adopted a bi-annual visit schedule, with the country managed from Australia—a situation which lasted through to 2018, when the company acknowledged that it should do more and started visiting more frequently.

Lack of contextual understanding

Besides lacking the necessary time and resources to engage with the Myanmar situation, the team in charge of Myanmar lacked the language skills and context to effectively keep up with local developments. Concerns over the company’s lack of understanding of the context and rapidly deteriorating situation were repeatedly raised by Myanmar civil society organisations, including through at least five in-person briefings in Menlo Park beginning in 2014 (Ortiz and Rafanan 2018). Despite the repeated warning and urges to hire local expertise, Facebook did not hire Myanmar staff until early 2019.

Meagre human rights due diligence

While the UN Guiding principles on Business and Human Rights (UNHR2011, 13) place a responsibility on companies to uphold human rights, it is unclear to what extent Facebook engaged in the necessary Human Rights due diligence when rolling out its product in Myanmar. The first sign of such an effort being undertaken was the commissioning of an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment (Facebook 2018a), which was published in November 2018, four years after the platform acquired its first million users in the country and more than five years after receiving its first warnings of abuse and weaponisation.

Limited use ofAI and automated detection

While Facebook claims to be leveraging technology to proactively detect community standards violations, it is unclear to what extent the company leveraged automation as part of its Burmese language moderation prior to 2018.

As per the company’s own reporting (Facebook 2018a, 2018c), only 13% of the content removed in the 4th quarter of 2017 was proactively identified. Judging by the number of reported removals in Myanmar in the 3rd quarter of 2018 (64,000), this would have represented at most 2000-3000 self-identified violations a month, raising questions about the scale and effectiveness of the system.

The mass takedown of content containing the keyword “kalar” in May 2017 (a derogatory slur used against Muslims of South Asian descent—but also a composite in harmless words such as kalar рас /chickpea or kalar htine/chair (Sin 2017)) also raised widespread concerns over the use of overly simplistic keyword- based detection, failing to account for linguistic or contextual considerations and negatively impacting on freedom of expression.

Insufficient investment into human moderation

Not only did Faccbook have minimal capacity for automated detection in Burmese language, but it also failed to adequately invest in human moderators. According to Reuters (Stecklow 2018), Faccbook hired its first moderator for Burmese language content in 2013, a year after concerns over misuse of the platform first made it into the US media. The company then scaled its moderation effort from two to four Burmese content moderators in 2015 to cope with the heightened risks associated with the historic elections taking place that year. Despite the rise in real world violence following the October 2016 and August 2017 attacks in Rakhine state, the company had only “dozens” of reviewers moderating Burmese content by the time Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify in front of the US congress in April 2018. Judging by the company’s recruitment ads at the time, it is also unclear how much linguistic and contextual understanding these reviewers had. The position of Myanmar Market Specialist, for example, had Burmese language skills listed as an “'ideal” rather than an “essential” requirement.

Meanwhile, outsourced reviewer jobs with companies like CPL, one of Face- book’s contractors at the time, required applicants to be legally authorised to work in Ireland, which severely restricted the pool of candidates and introduced a clear bias towards members of the Myanmar diaspora, who had often left Myanmar while the country was still a military regime and before Faccbook became widely available and used.

Lack of effective emergency mechanism

With Faccbook lacking the capacity to self-moderate its platform, it relied extensively on escalations from third parties to address dangerous content and emergencies. In the absence of a formal escalation mechanism, however, these escalations had to be channelled via email or messaging apps to policy staff, who lacked language and context, were not empowered to take action and worked outside of Myanmar working hours. As a result, emergencies, even when flagged, were often not addressed quickly enough to mitigate their impact.

Focus on individual content appeals and PR campaigns rather than structural enforcement solutions

Working through the policy team also presented major limitations as policy staff' were neither trained nor empowered to identify and address systemic flaws with the product and its inner workings. As a result, most of Faccbook’s response to the deteriorating situation in Myanmar focused on developing, or commissioning, communication materials and on addressing case by case appeals. These solutions placed the bulk of the responsibility on Myanmar users and civil society and did little to address the root causes of the problem, which lay in the systematic abuse and weaponisation of the platform by coordinated actors.

154 Victoire Rio A belated awakening

In April 2018, after being ealled out by the UN (Miles 2018), Myanmar civil society (Open Letter 2018), the US Congress (“Transcript” 2018) and the US media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had been too slow to respond to the abuse and weaponisation of its platform in Myanmar. He pledged to dedicate more resources as well as to establish a cross functional team to mitigate the risks of Facebook contributing to real world harm in Myanmar.

In the months since, Facebook has ramped up its efforts in the country, including hiring a dedicated Myanmar public policy team, increasing content reviewer capacity, rolling out Burmese language AI classifiers and engaging far more widely with local civil society.