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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

This quote is from this Vox interview: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebo...

The really interesting follow-up question here, which didn't get asked, would've been, "who's doing that?"

I imagine the answer is relatively uninteresting, and consists of "many ordinary people from the respective ethnic groups who have Facebook accounts, who are in turn influenced by decades of ethnic tension, rumours, actual news and explicit messages from organised groups mostly within the country"

The only real question is whether Facebook is a more effective vector for such messages than offline rumour mills, and I'm not sure it necessarily is. (If anything I'd say social media has added an awareness the outside world has rather lost its admiration for Aung Sung Suu Kyi and been a lot more sympathetic to the Rohingya than the average Burmese person might expect, but I'm not convinced that's helping much either)

The quote seems to imply that it was a single group of people that were inflaming tensions in both other groups. That's a lot more nefarious than people with ethnic grudges.

It raises a few 'who' questions, besides 'who is sending these messages?' but also 'who receives that alert and makes the decision to block these things?' and 'who's in charge of the heuristics the system uses to identify these behaviors?'

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