A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
These and other tragedies lie in the past. We would do well to look for the warning signs of these in the future: what media organisations are publishing propaganda about ethnic minorities? What incitement to and tacit endorsement of violence is currently being broadcast or circulated on Facebook and other places?
They incited war this way, still ongoing.
Why is there so much "whataboutism" whenever anyone brings up these issues?
Sure Russia has rights violations.
China has censorship and Uighurs.
The US has all kinds of toddlers in internment camps.
Etc etc etc. Lots of bad things happening in lots of other places.
But right now we're talking about the number they're doing on the Rohingya. Sheez.
If you want to talk about Russia, or Brazilian death squads, or immigrant toddlers, or whatever submit a link and we can talk about it.
I think it comes about as a way for people to "explain away" or "brush off" things that happen in our modern world that we are just too lazy/busy/preoccupied or otherwise can't be bothered to fix.
It doesn't really matter what the thing that happens is, someone will always chime in with "yeah, that's just like when xyz happened" - which is a completely useless thing to say, but I think it helps people feel better that the world is not utter chaos, and things are not entirely isolated or have no precedent.
Of course, as you say, it would be much more productive to spend time trying to solve or eliminate said things, but gossip and media and reality TV aren't about that.
It’s the diplomatic equivalent of “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to see the beam of wood in your own?”
I was interested in the link because it provides more interesting information on the topic. It lacks any comparison / judgement as far as I can tell.
The article is about Myanmar so unless there is something interesting about the fact that Russia is doing sort-of-the-same-thing-but-not-really things, it's not really relevant, is it?
Someone posts a Show HN about something they’ve worked on, and the top comment is usually something that is mildly related but completely tangential to the actual posting.
It should be easy enough to ignore, but it has been happening so often I’ve started having a visceral negative reaction that makes me not want to even open the comments anymore.
Which is disappointing because the HN comments are usually a treasure trove of information.
That's half the reason I come to HN :-)
> The article is about Myanmar
Is it? I read it as an article about the role of social networks in spreading information about groups of people via channels that collect diverse viewers. Essentially what happens when you gather random people on the street and shout something polarising. The specific case of it this time is Myanmar and FB, but I'd like to understand more about it as a general phenomenon.
The link was interesting because it shows an example of news reporting leading to that situation and links to interesting papers in references.
Note the parent comment's lack of "It's okay because ..."
It's not okay. And it's not whataboutism.
Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Bringing up related incidents isn't, per se, a dismissal of the issue.
It’s not whataboutism, it’s basically the same story. Rogue state actors abuse free speech to spread fakes in media, the fakes cause terrible things like genocides or wars.
There’re many visitors here on HN who live in Europe, myself included. I’ve wrote that comment to remind people the problem is not local to some distant location 10 hours flight away. Unfortunately, the problem is global, and is much closer than Myanmar.
I understand why media behave this way. They’re selling advertisements and don’t care much about global issues, at least when it takes resources to combat these rogue states. They’re private businesses, strictly speaking it’s not their responsibility to do anything besides making money for their shareholders, and they probably have good legal departments and are not breaking any laws of their jurisdictions.
But just because I understand that doesn’t mean I like that. The more people will care about the problem, the more likely we’ll be able to come up with a solution.
It's not just these types of threads either. Any thread that has Apple, Microsoft, Google, or pretty much everything eventually devolves into these types of threads.
It used to bother me a lot more than it does now, because I just accepted that once I hit the inevitable whatabout post I just go do something else. Its a good sign that there's nothing left in the thread.
The current state of affairs is such that only those voices that conform to the government's official narrative will be heard and promoted while those that do exercise critical thought can't verbalize it online without fear of violence and intimidation.
It would seem that there are many citizens in nations (e.g. US) where internet access is not a new phenomenon do not do this either, so I don't think that is a valid excuse.
If you're dining with Satan, you can't decline dessert. You have to eat everything Satan prepares for the evening. You can try to run away, but I'm not sure you would get very far.
Let's suppose that you had open protocols. How would that stop the spread of false and incendiary information about the Rohingya in this case? I mean, these people just happen to use Facebook to spread that information because Facebook is available. Who's to say they wouldn't just use the open protocol servers to spread the information if Facebook had not been available?
This sort of thing is simply a consequence of being able to spread information. So Zuckerberg can run, we hackers can come up with open protocols, and whatever else, but this problem would still exist.
This is just my opinion, but I don't think open protocols solve this problem, because this is a human problem at its root. The problem is the people, not really the tools.
2. What technical solutions would be better at fending off these kinds of propaganda attacks?
I am trying to figure out, for example, whether Reddit is more or less susceptible. As far as I can tell, individual subreddits do better and worse based on their members, moderation, voting policies, and scale.
Not optimizing for engagement at all may help. Driving people who whish to air their oppinions in public to blogs with RSS as a "follow" button may help. Not concentrating everyone and their mother on the same platform may help. Decentralizing the central features of FB to different providers and technolgies will make it harder to concert these propaganda efforts in my oppinion. Not that they will not try, as has been mentionend before this has happened before the internet existed.
It makes money, but it has a net negative social effect. Do we, as a society, stigmatize, or at least not encourage greed? We don't. So you might as well say that these people are not the victims of the mythical, absolute evil, aka the devil; they're victims of our conflicted sense of value.
They look at growth as the only metric that matters and as a result have a vacuum in governance and practice. They appear to not fundamentally now respect the userbase, and have not appeared to seriously consider the conduct of partners on the platform in the past.
Anyone of the age of the Facebook leadership should have always understood how online forums work. Anyone who used Slashdot in the old days understood moderation, trolls, etc.
What?
The reality is that this is not a technology problem. It is a human problem.
Not always. A surprising number of HN commenters in those threads supported both Facebook and the genocide.
Either way, HN was anything but disinterested.
I'm skeptical that there actually were non-grey comments in support of the genocide
You won't find many threads where Islam, Muslims or immigrants are mentioned in which at least some anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias doesn't appear, including this one.
Edit: what did saana say that got them flagged out? Is this the one?
Yes. It's safe to say that comment had anti-muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-minority bias.
There are many people like that in the world though. It's unreasonable to require them to not exist before we discuss topics like this. In fact, in a very real way, they are the entire reason we find ourselves needing to discuss topics like this.