Class-action suit filed against Meta for facilitating Rohingya Genocide [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Class-action suit filed against Meta for facilitating Rohingya Genocide [pdf]

edelson.com

149 pointsRobLach156 comments

This reminds me of something I’ve been mulling over for a while.

Should it be illegal for a media outlet to publish the untested claims of a lawsuit?

I’ve seen this behavior all too often. “XYZ happened, person A did this, claims new suit”.

You can sue over just about anything, and make whatever absurd claims you want. People see these headlines and believe as if they have been settled in court when this is almost never the case at print time.

I think it's fine to report on the claims in a lawsuit once an initial hearing has taken place. If a judge reviews the claims and believes them to be reliable enough for the case to proceed, then it's enough to report as long as it's made clear that the claims are from a lawsuit that hasn't been fully tested in court.

The standard for surviving a motion to dismiss is really low in Federal Court. The court mostly assumes the factual allegations are true and then decides whether a claim could be made based on the law. So it's mostly a tool to weed out legally deficient law suits, but not factually wrong law suits.

The judge won't consider the actual evidence until the case progresses pretty far--the summary judgement stage. But even then, the judge only grants summary judgement if there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact.

I think news media outlets usually have to throw an "allegedly" in there somewhere. This is a direct link to the lawsuit though. The title was chosen by a user, presumably a private individual.

Or "claims are untested in court" is a common disclaimer in Canada

My one firmly held view about reporting on lawsuits is that it should be stigmatized to publish an article that doesn't also publish the docket number.

It's just cruel and shortsighted for the reporter to have the complaint right in front of them and not (1) publish the docket number and venue so readers can look up the current state of the case themselves; maybe also (2) publish the PDF.

TechDirt is pretty good in this regard: they provide the PDFs which have the docket numbers on them.

I think making that sort of thing illegal raises a lot of thorny free speech and press freedom issues; a related and perhaps more approachable question might be: should it be considered journalistically unethical to produce such a headline?

It would be far more ethical to produce both suit and opposition. "Person A alleges Company B did X, causing them to suffer damages. Company B states that X was actually Y and that they are not responsible for the damages Person A suffered. The courts will decide."

That is essentially what sueing is. Class action lawsuit filed seems very clear and concise to me. I expect to find those exact details in the article given the title

Yes, but that is what I think the press should support, rather than amplifying the most outrage producing view of the situation (of the type where the headline reads: "Company B's faulty widgets lead to Person A's excruciating death!" subtitle: "Screamed for hours the whole time he was dying. Family sues for millions" and then you later find out that Person A bought a bank vault full of widgets and swan dived into them like Scrooge McDuck).

Neutral news, or at least somewhat equally amplified and balanced views that don't have to be arbitrarily oppositional in nature.

Lawsuits are public records at the time they are filed, which in general is one of the foundational principles of the US. This is done for a good reason, so that judges and prosecutors can be held accountable.

Media Outlets can lie about anything, that includes already objectively justified data that came out of a direct legal proceeding.

I've seen this done a lot and it's done in such a way where they have blatantly lied and stated "X did Y" but actually the case stated and proved that "X never did Y".

How to correct that Media Outlet? Waste $$$ and time to get them to change their fake news. It doesn't work.

Between the UN fact-finding mission saying Facebook played a “determining role” in the genocide, the Bosworth memo, and the shit ton of access we now have thanks to the whistleblower, how is this not a strong case?

I don’t see how Facebook is liable for the actions of other adults.maybe evidence comes out that Facebook actively encouraged it. But seems unlikely.

What if they just passively or inadvertently encouraged it? It’s entirely possible that the algorithms Facebook has used to prioritize content highlight inflammatory or violent content. Maybe in the process of maximizing attention they simultaneously optimized for showing violent or hateful content. YouTube has been shown to have done almost exactly that.

For better or worse, passively encouraging genocide isn't illegal under US law.

I'm not so sure you're right about that... Speech has limits and Facebook has corporate responsibility. They do monitor speech in the USA and still the impact is big (see January 6th) this is what happens with zero monitoring.

They can claim discrimination and many other such claims. It seems there's a lot of evidence to support criminal negligence. If inaction led to deaths a civil suit can get a big payout.

If that's how low the bar is set then most of the US media would be legally liable for the war in Iraq.

Facebook doesn't show content chronologically. Their algorithm decides what people see. They may not have purposefully pushed pro genocide content, but that doesn't mean they aren't liable if the court finds they were negligent in building the algorithm.

I don’t doubt the algorithm prioritizes popular content. But how you go from that to saying the algorithm prioritizes genocidal content I don’t know.

It might not be intentional, but there's a pretty good chance that it does lead to extremism. I haven't read it, but perhaps the UN report has more information.

I believe it could be true because it doesn't seem that different from reports[1] a few years ago talking about how YouTube would push more and more extreme suggestions.

IIRC YouTube made changes pushing people towards more mainstream content and away from small producers in part to avoid extremism.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/3/18293293/youtube...

There is no law against doing things that tend to encourage extremism. For example, it's would be perfectly legal for a communist to state in general terms that we should execute all rich people as class enemies. Now obviously that's a horrible thing to say, but it isn't illegal.

There doesn't have to be a law against something for a jury to find you responsible for damages. This is a civil suit, right?

Well, if it was a communist state there wouldn't be any rich people to execute, that's kinda the whole point.

> negligent in building the algorithm

Otherwise it would be a precedent for creating algorithms that break the law.

BTW, you are 100% reasonable I do not understand the down votes.

Facebook is a radicalization engine.

It is designed to reinforce existing beliefs and preferences in order to increase engagement.

In this case the beliefs were virulently racists and bigoted, and the engagement was usually done with a machete.

More generally, it's an anything-that-improves-the-bottom-line engine.

And it turns out that hate, fear, and tribalism are great for that.

These all add up to a story where Facebook is doing bad things having a negative impact on the world, but that's a very different question than whether they violated any legal obligations. The plaintiff's primary theory of harm seems to be that Facebook allowed people to publish "extreme and outrageous hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories", and publishing things like that would be legally protected in the US even if Mark Zuckerberg himself were the one writing them.

It's going to get into some very thick first-amendment weeds before section 230 protections are even introduced. Where do we draw the culpability line? Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts? If so, then if next week a failed coup attempt occurs in Burma to try and overthrow the military power that took control, should Facebook be held accountable for aiding and abetting the coup? We rapidly converge on a scenario where Facebook is culpable for existing, and then we may as well start shutting off forums in general.

With broad fringes, we generally draw the line at "no, the media isn't constrained from propagating a message; the responsibility rests on the speaker and the listener" in the US.

Not to say the suit has no merit. Merely that it faces a stiff headwind and a long uphill battle against a very laissez-faire freedom-of-information-flow precedent.

I would love to learn more about which precedents are relevant to this case.

Does the first amendment and section 230 mean anything in Burma?

The suit was filed in the state of California and would be judged under US law.

Ah, that makes sense.

In general I think I agree with you, but on forums this is subtly different.

In a general internet forum, it's up to you decide what you read. On FB, there's an algorithm that determines your feed, and therefore the profit of Facebook itself.

If FB were connecting people, making the world a better place, and making profit by doing that, I think I'd be fine with that.

But it looks like FB can trade the general good will of people, replace it with extremism and make a profit doing so. And if that's true, I think we need to seriously look at section 230.

There's a series of commons that we all share (e.g. water, air). I'm not quite sure if this fits in this category, but for democracy to work, people have to agree to not resort to violence to solve their problems. Trading the common good will for your fellow country men for profit, while watching the world burn, is I think not what we want as a society.

Every forum has an algorithm (including this one, which sorts by upvotes and hides dead content unless the user asks for it).

Hacker News doesn't have an algorithm to decides what's the best posts and should appear in a person's feed. It has editors/moderators.

The contents of the main page aren't decided by editors and moderators. It's an algorithm... granted, a simple one, but an algorithm nonetheless. Weighted factor of upvotes and age.

It's even game-able, if a person has a large enough posse to dump upvotes on a topic after creating it.

So I think there's two big differences.

1. Most people use facebook to keep track of their friends and family rather than email these days. Part of it is that you can announce the new baby in the family and it goes to everyone. But the FB algorithm decides what you view. So the most engaging a post is, the more likely it will show up in your feed.

The problem is that not all posts go to everyone, and if you actually want to see what's happening with Uncle Ed's cancer treatment, you have to physically go to his facebook page. Why? See point #2:

2. There was a time before Twitter/FB where ads paid for the server the forum was on. Social media realized that "targeted engagement" could be profitable. So by tweaking their algorithms to keep people on the platform, they would make more in ad revenue as they can sell more ads.

Of course this led to stories where good friends had died a year ago, and the facebook algorithm "neglected" to prioritize it on feeds, because it wasn't as engaging as the Bills/Jets game the day before.

Hacker News in absolutely no way shape or form has an algorithmic system on the same level Facebook has, it is manifestly a bad analogy

It's not an analogy, it's just a literal truth. HN has an algorithm (of far less complexity than Facebook's) for determining what shows up at the top of the news page and the comments on a topic.

A possible question of interest, were this lawsuit to find Facebook guilty, is "If someone somehow gamed HN's algorithm (which is relatively simple, so would in practice be pretty easy to game) to encourage a genocide, should HN be liable?" How complicated the algorithm is likely does not enter into the reasoning for culpability.

So HN is largely not making money off their website, since they're aren't selling targeted advertising -- at least not to the extent FB makes.

If your targeted algorithm makes the company money off planning a genocide, and if you're aware of it and do nothing about it (because lawyers say blah blah section 230 blah blah), that's a real problem. If you're making money from people whining about a bad call in a football game, so what? But if your company actively promotes criminal content and profits from it, then section 230 probably isn't going to save you. Either it will change, or the courts will force you to.

> Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts?

Did Facebook promoted that posts? That seems to be the problem. High hate seems to equal high engagement that equals more money.

If Facebook profited of promoting genocide posts, that is clearly morally wrong. It can easily be also illegal and a felony.

Facebook is not a chat but a curated feed of news. Back when it started it was not like that, but when the timeline became the curated feed then everything changed and responsibility is on the curators side.

Personally, I think Facebook's largest problem in this situation is that they were overly reliant on "AI" systems to flag hate speech, which is against their terms of service anyways.

The problem is that Myanmar up until recently (until after the genocide) wasn't even using Unicode, and Facebook only did the bare minimum to get Zawgyi-text processing up.

They also did not hire any Burmese language moderators until it was too late, in a country where Facebook more or less became synonymous with the internet. Meanwhile, Facebook had worked with local phone companies to preinstall the app on phones.

So again, I think this was growth at all costs, without thinking about the consequences, until they got enough egg on their face.

Here is a bit more detail on this determined role they took to spread the speech from reuters.

"To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.

Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”

According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee."

In fairness to Facebook you can hardly expect them to hire employees in Myanmar. It would be impossible to keep them safe.

I wasn't totally clear about the difference between total apathy, which I'm sure facebook had for a small country with a language not in system vs "determined effort".

The Rohingyas are hardly innocent and have conducted massacres and ethnic cleansing themselves[1]. How about they sue themselves first?

1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/myanmar-new-e...

This is a distraction. No one is innocent. Ever. That doesn't remove the blame from the guilty party.

Your claim is similar to a guy running over me with his car then claiming I ran over someone else with a car a few years back. Two separate cases which have no baring on one another... Sounds like something a Facebook lawyer would say.

Sure, I'm not saying FB is not guilty. But one of the so-called "fake news" spread against the Rohingyas was specifically this - that they committed ethnic cleansing against others in Rakhine. Turns out it was not fake at all.

Obama graced Aung San Suu Kyi despite her well known track record. Obama also at similar times embraced Narendra Modi, despite his known track record. Obama even removed the Modi sanctions and visa block that George W Bush put on him after his alleged role in the Gujarat Muslim massacre/genocide. Newspapers gloated about Obama's bromance with Modi.

Will they now sue Obama?

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/asia-and-australia/how-au...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/9/14/obama-to-aung-san-s...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/27/asia/india-obama-modi-loo...

Interesting how you portrayed Obama in a way that he's a does-only-good person. He played a huge role in Arab springs which destroyed more lives than any of the other alleged bad deeds you refer. Some probably should sue him, not for indirect roles, but direct ones.

Presidents have complete legal immunity for all official acts. Cranks file lawsuits against Presidents all the time and judges immediately dismiss them.

I think 1cvmask is actually being quite critical of Obama.

At the time Bush visa-banned Modi, he was not the Prime Minister of India. By the time Obama embraced him, he was. For better or worse, Modi came to power in a free and fair, democratic election. Diplomacy demands treating him like any other leader of a major power.

There's this WP article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/faceboo...

where they bend the truth. The headline is "5 points for an angry emoji, one for a like", but in reality it's 5 points for any emoji at all, and one for a like. Which I think makes sense, hitting like is something that's automatic for a lot of people, whereas taking the time to select an emoji that most closely matches your reaction to a post is a much more "engaged" interaction.

So I'm a little confused. How is Facebook responsible for some thing a government did? Or is this just because they can't do anything to the government without invading.

Not to mention that Myanmar has had serious problems with repression of religious and ethnic minorities for decades. I find it very difficult to believe Facebook is the spark that ignited an already sectarian government in a country with a long history of ethnic persecution.

Didn't know signing as "Jane Doe" was a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_defendants

EDIT: to clarify, in this case "Jane Doe" is the plaintiff.

I learned of "Corporation Doe" through the epstein private suits.

Will someone do the same against Twitter for the Arab springs which lead to the rise of ISIS?

Why not against Western countries who did far more to create ISIS then merely be a passive communication platform?

Algorithmically tailoring feeds is not passive.

I think the Iraq invasion of 2003 is what really set us down the path of ISIS.

The spread outside of Iraq to the rest of the Levant is most certainly due to neighboring countries being destabilized.

Seems kind of a wild leap to blame the rise of ISIS on Twitter.

ISIS came from the events in Iraq and is an offshoot of "Al Qaeda in Iraq". It even stands for "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant". They existed long before the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring started in 2010 and ISIS didn't enter Syria (which I think is the connection you're making?) until well after that.

Twitter, and others, is a tool of the government, and national security state, and was weaponized multiple times to overthrow governments, institute color revolutions, allow terrorists to flourish etc... The Obama administration even bragged about it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media....

PSYOPs existed long before Twitter and others. Social networks and ML just made the tools more powerful and precise.

Starting to wonder if the name became "Meta" so that the headlines wouldn't read "Class action suit filed against Facebook" or "Scandal involving Facebook".

There used to be some telecom company in my country, who had some TV personality in all of their TV ads. Then, one day he wasn't in the ads anymore. It had been said that they stopped putting him in the ads, because the audience tends to associate negative emotions with a person more easily than with abstract concepts.

Perhaps something similar is going on with some of these tech companies, where they use some really abstract name to which it's hard to attach negative emotions to.

Maybe they should stop putting Zuck in front of cameras. I associate strong negative emotions with him.

How effective can such a thing be? Aren't they using the Meta keyword on all of their products now? As well as the fact it was likely all over the news, globally.

The headline didn't mention facebook, did it?

Let's see https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/facebook-changes-company-nam... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/technology/facebook-meta-... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601

Though you have a point, I know a lot of people who don't know that Alphabet is the parent of Google.

Seems like you completely missed the point of 0day's comments.

I can't think of any other explanation to why you'd use the word "Though" here.

I think this is overthinking it.

Mark Zuckerberg is the head of the world's most mundane tech company at the moment, so he changed the name and the focus of the company to try and dig out of this hole.

Not gonna lie, I always thought slightly worse of Facebook just because of the name. Not on purpose, it just seemed a silly name for such a large company. It's like if Toys "R" Us somehow became a powerhouse of a company you heard about all the time.

It probably says more about me and my perceptions of social networks than anything else, and my perceptions of Facebook from the early days persisting with the name. But that's the thing with names, they don't matter. Except they actually do a little bit.

It actually took me a while to realize this, but some areas use the term 'facebook' (before the website was around), as a term similar in meaning to what most of us call a "yearbook"

"Class action suit filed against Facebook's Parent company, Meta" Easy fix. Just look at Google / Alphabet reporting.

But that's not what the headline says

The poster of this PDF link chose the headline and who here at HN doesn't know who Meta are? Also read the Plaintiff in the document:

Plaintiff, v. META PLATFORMS, INC. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.), a Delaware corporation

By changing the name, we get headlines like

" Investors sue Meta for alleged failure to protect mental health of users "

https://www.jurist.org/news/2021/11/investors-sue-meta-for-a...

And

"‘An egregious breach of public trust’: Ohio sues Meta over whistleblower revelations"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/16/ohio-sues...

Does it stop every headline? No. But it helps disconnect the idea of "facebook the site" (pics of granny's cat) and "facebook the company" (shady)

Governments should form an international institution to regulate the algorithms used by social media and search engines. The goal of this institution should strictly be to ensure that algorithms of big tech companies:

- Are impartial to specific (especially large) corporate or political interests.

- Promote decentralization.

Economic decentralization is necessary to ensure that markets remain competitive (which is good for consumers) and it limits how much power any specific entity has over society.

No thanks. I don't want repressive authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia or Australia to have any control over my social media feeds.

Reminds me of IBM and WW2. Maybe a class action suit should be drawn up for IBM also?

Or IBM and apartheid.

Like this one

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/world/lawsuit-says-ibm-ai...

And this one

https://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/08/ramasastry.holocaust....

Plenty of companies have been sued and paid out claims for their use of forced Jewish labor and other wrongs during WW2.

And yet plenty of American corporations are using slave labor today. Wonder where those lawsuits are, or has Congress shielded them from consequences.

American companies are sued and pay claims every single day for violations of employment labor standards.

Just as an example you can find lawsuits against Uber for misclassifying its workers as independent contractors instead of employees.

Not sure what of facts you have that shows American companies using slaves and being immune from civil or criminal lawsuits.

Can we trust this news? Who is edelson?

They're the firm that won the USD $650 million privacy suit against Facebook earlier this year. They....kind of have a track record when it comes to class action lawsuits.

Wow! $650B privacy law suit. Impressive! Are you sure about that number? It seems a bit high?

Million. Fixed the reply.

Makes more sense. $150B is another magnitude vs $650M. I mean wow, you want to make sure that you can trust this.

Edleson is Counsel for Plaintiff and the Proposed Class, the Plaintiff in the Complaint that's linked to.

Are you asking if the company that created this document actually filed it?

Here's some news about it

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/your-profit-fuelled-genoc...

This seems kind of silly. Should radio equipment manufacturers be liable for the Rwandan genocide? I'm not fan of Facebook (I don't even have an account) but requiring them to fulfill a function that the Burmese government didn't do seems shortsighted.

If radio equipment manufacturers built their business on choosing which messages to promote would it change things?

Radio equipment manufacturers don't specifically amplify messages that incite outrage, and also don't perform mass psychological experiments on their users [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

And there's a difference between something like a forum that moderates versus what Facebook's algorithm is doing -- one is reactive to its users (and generally reacting based on what other users believe is inappropriate conduct), while the algorithm is proactive in pushing content to users.

When other companies do it, it's an A/B test. When FB does it, it's a "mass psychological experiment." What a joke.

If they can not fulfill that, then they should offer their service in such countries, or at the very least stop doing it once they became aware of the issue.

Facebook's scale comes with responsibility.

Yeah but Facebook is eager to take on the moderator role. They would have been much smarter to, like a radio provider or telco say: "we are just the pipeline, we are happy to follow all court orders but we aren't moderating past that", but now that they have actively embraced these kind of moderator roles they've lost the ability to make that claim.

That’s a great point, and one can argue that there are lower hanging fruit with respect to this hill they’ve chose to die on. Lots of inconclusive stuff got moderated down about Covid (origins, vaccine discussions, masks, so on) by both YouTube and Facebook. It feels like that’s a way easier case to win initially than proving genocide.

Facebook moderates content heavily because that's what advertisers want. The major ad buyers don't want their ads to show up next to anything highly offensive. So no, from a profit standpoint it wouldn't be smarter to stop moderating.

I agree however time will tell if caving was the best business move. They had a ton of leverage and they could have said no.

Now they have opened themselves to essentially unlimited legal liability.

Yes, we understand the incentives. My kids want to stay up past their bedtime, but I still say no because of the consequences the next day. I'm sure you agree that simply because someone wants you to do something it has no bearing on whether it was the correct choice or not.

What if the radio equipment had algorithms that spied on your communication and used that information to help you find people and groups that facilitated genocide?

When you use our special transmitters and your listeners use our special headphones, then the headphones will send an encoded signal saying their owner is more liable to be affected by broadcasts urging genocide! This allows you to use the differential broadcasting properties of our transmitter to send special commit genocide now messages to genocide ready users of our headphones while continuing to send innocuous look at this cute bunny pictures to people who will soon be killed!

Buy now, operators are standing by.

on edit: I guess it should be innocuous renditions of The Little Drummer boy to stick to the analogy, but I was momentarily taken by the little bunny idea.

Will there be actual personal responsibility for management and engineers involved?

Nobody below the C-level would have any real responsibility in a case like this.

Did accountants, engineers, and other staff, receive sentences for participation in other genocides? Serious question.

Not sure if a valid analogy, but don’t think engineers who designed and built autobahns or other infrastructure in Nazi Germany were held responsible for indirectly facilitating a genocide.

Some journalists and announcers for Radio Télévision Libre des Milles-Collines were given sentences after the Rwandan genocide. (I am not saying Facebook's role is at all comparable to RTLMC's)

I have no idea. I believe in Nuremburg trials (an exceptional and extraordinary situation far behind what this case claims) most of the legal power was brought to bear on leaders although we often say "just following orders" is not an excuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders).

The people who created this case want to damage the leadership of the company (who set the primary policy decisions), not engineers or other staff, unless they could find that an engineer worked on their own (and documented in a discoverable way).

Honestly, I don't think this case has even a remote chance of making it through the courts. The filer would have done far better to not ask for a enormous monetary sum (2X the GDP of myanmar).

they're all just doing their jobs, of course

Well, Zuck did retain 51% control of the company. If there are any knives out in the org structure, I bet they'd be delighted to watch him take the blame. Plus aren't all the expensive lawyers tied up with Maxwell and Trump's allies right now?

Doesn't that presume guilt a bit? The whole point of a trial is to see if there is guilt, and if so maybe which parties are guilty will be shown (in the case of a company).

This is a civil trial. If it goes forward then the court will determine liability, not guilt.

Yes, but isn't the presumption that you're only liable if you are in some way guilty (culpable) of what's being alleged?

In any case, just because someone's levied some charges doesn't mean we should necessarily assume they are accurate. I'm not s fan of Facebook by any means, but that doesn't mean I support trial by public opinion before there's even a chance for defense.

Software Engineers aren't really engineers IMHO. In the US, Professional Engineers are often licensed and can be punished for malpractice. Maybe licensing and enforcing standards of practice wouldn't be such a bad idea for software engineers.

Good.

Facebook is the global scale, slow motion online equivalent of the Fyre Festival.

The British, EU, and US can get away with extorting FB/MS/Apple every few years because the loss of those markets would be greater than the extortion they're asking for (in the form of regulations).

It's laughable that the small market Burmese think they can pull this garbage. Facebook doesn't need Myanmar and the Burmese government would best prepare for a second insurrection if they think their people would be okay with Facebook pulling out from Myanmar.

You clearly have no idea who is filing this case or why. Start with a simple google search, or even just the wiki page

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

What's laughable is the insinuation that any population would be willing to start an insurrection over the absence of fucking Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com