Meta in Myanmar

Erin Kissane just published a fantastic and terrifying piece about Meta’s complicity in the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar:

From far away, I think Meta’s role in the Rohingya crisis can feel blurry and debatable—it was content moderation fuckups, right? In a country they weren’t paying much attention to? Unethical and probably negligent, but come on, what tech company isn’t, at some point?

Later, Erin clarifies that nope, absolutely not:

They’d been shown example after example of dehumanizing posts and comments calling for mass murder, even explicitly calling for genocide. And David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.

Erin’s work here really is fantastic: setting up the groundwork and context of Myanmar’s relationship with the internet and how it led to a nation’s reliance on Facebook becoming their internet.