An Independent Assessment of the Human Rights Impact of Facebook in Myanmar | Hacker News Reader

An Independent Assessment of the Human Rights Impact of Facebook in Myanmar

newsroom.fb.com

71 pointsinfodocket27 comments

Unfortunately the report itself uses diplomatic language which can be hard to parse. For example:

BSR also notes that the recent action to remove senior military officials from Facebook has a material impact on Facebook’s ability to implement some of BSR’s recommendations, especially those that relate to activities undertaken inside Myanmar.

I take this to mean, "Facebook's attempt to punish Myanmar's military leaders has infuriated the government and its supporters, and this blowback has made it harder for Facebook to protect the rights of the Rohingya minority."

Unfortunately the report itself uses diplomatic language which can be hard to parse.

Which is, of course, central to the very purpose of the report.

A (possibly dumb) question which might not have an exact answer:

Facebook is always asked to stop the divisive nature and curb the misuse of the platform. As a techie, we all know how hard it is. A problem made even more complex by different places, regions, cultures, languages, norms, customs and so on. Facebook has been accepting of its mistakes and defensive. A real drawback is that they are using the same language of curbing/stopping as the ones used by the media outlets.

Question is: What if someone flips the algorithm to show positive news only or show feed not based on interest (to drive engagement) but based on what relaxes a person. Especially in sensitive regions like these? Facebook would end up losing more users, by the very nature of humans who would find another medium to do what they are currently doing. So, this will not be a permanent solution, but would make the separatist people find other ways.

I get this does not curb fake news. But what this can do is stop taking people on the roller coaster of emotions, especially in sensitive areas. When people are emotional, they do not care about the opposite viewpoint, or even how radical their actions could be.

If this is dumb, please tell me. If not, why are people not talking about it?

You are making the assumption that Facebook actually cares about a solution to this - whether it be the curbing of fake news or the real-life consequences from runaway political extremism and divisiveness that it's platform leads to. Facebook cares about making money, and only cares just enough to react to recent bad press because bad press means less money.

Michael Moore discussed TV news in Bowling for Columbine: scary news glues eyeballs to TV sets, and glued eyeballs are better for ads. So probably by accident Facebook ended up with the same system. Not just scary, I'd wager emotional stuff drives up engagement (imagine a political argument of people screaming "YOU'RE WRONG!") , and Mark and Jack could probably hear the kaching of those ad views.

Also how screwed up is the media landscape in the USA. Political news, and then ads for political candidates. In 2008 the media kept blaring about the "tight race" between Obama and Clinton, and then later on between Obama and McCain. Hmm, were they being honest or did they want to keep eyeballs glued to sell ads? Also political ads?

As part of that commitment, we commissioned an independent human rights impact assessment on the role of our services in Myanmar and today we are publishing the findings.

An entity paid by FB to investigate its misconduct is, by definition, not "independent".

Who exactly should fund the investigation?

Crowd funding, contributions from news organizations, etc.

The ICIJ is probably a good model.

This reads like what has become the standard Facebook PR response: they claim to be committed to improvement, but will ultimately do nothing actually effective. On the one hand, because it is excruciatingly difficult in what is relevant, and on the other hand, because they won't ever come close to harm their business in what is actually feasible.

"...we commissioned an independent human rights impact assessment ..."

Once commissioned I would say they are no longer independent?

Wow. I did a Ctrl+F, and not once the words 'Rohingya' or 'genocide' or even 'murder' is mentioned. Amazing.

"Offline violence" and "offline harm" is the newspeak used by this particular flack. As if these things were on a 1 to 10 scale going from "IRL bullying" to "IRL genocide" and might be tackled with the same toolset.

Why not just pull out of Myanmar all together?

When a document or its derivatives are intended to be read and accepted by all sides of a conflict, neutral language is a necessity. It's ugly, but without neutral wording representatives of the Myanmar government likely won't even read past the first paragraph.

Beyond blocking misuse of the platform... is there some news feed algorithm that would maximize the spread of human rights?

Should fb actively promote stories about real humanitarian crises? Should they promote stories of integration in ares with mounting tensions?

I'll take that as a no?

I don't have a strong position, just that it would at least an interesting engineering challenge.

AB testing human flourishing...

Would be a bit like the Foundation.

When we look at China: banning Western social media platforms and promoting their own... Maybe their are good reasons for doing so. In this case, better policing of the platform...

This is somewhat a reason that although a lot of educated Chinese people might not totally agree with the policy of the government , they understand the reason behind the strict media control. However their different altitude from average westerners are misinterpreted as: 1.They are brainwashed by government propaganda, or 2.They don't understand the value of free speech , or 3.They are too nationalistic (That's partially true. Eastern Asian are generally more nationalistic than other nationals except average Americans).

There are other countries adopt similar policies which also lead to success: Singapore, Rwanda. Unfortunately few people want to debate the dark side of free speech because of political correctness. Nowadays there are already some brave voices debating about intelligence vs ethnicity. Hopefully the debate can extend to other topic such as different nations/cultures/populations have different levels of rationality and immune to fake news quite differently.

Facebook will always present itself as your ‘friend’, even if you are a victim of genocide.

So, the answer is more censorship on Facebook?

Just so we're clear -- you're arguing against Facebook taking actions and removing posts that the government used to foment ethnic hatred and to carry out an actual genocide?

The bizarre devotion to 'free speech' on a social media site over people literally being murdered is incredible to me.

Facebook had an opportunity to stop the Myanmar equivalent to the Rwandan RTLM and failed miserably, which cost thousands of people their lives and tens of thousands of people their homes. Why didn't the Tutsis just start their own radio station?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Télévision_Libre_des_Mil...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com