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Comment by yoz | Hacker News Reader

Read this. Once I started, I couldn't stop. It's a far quicker read than it looks (though this is just part 1) and utterly essential.

Kissane has put together a concise, readable, and horrifying account of both the background of the Rohingya genocide and how Meta actively fanned the flames.

Her argument for Meta's culpability is simple and effective. Meta faced two problems in Myanmar: (1) not enough Facebook users, and (2) increasing incitement and hate speech that was clearly and repeatedly stoking anti-Rohingya violence. The company repeatedly showed that it was only interested in growing the user base, even though they were clearly aware of how that growth fed a genocide.

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Is there another side to the story? Seems like revenue on (at the time) a couple million users in Myanmar would not be worth the PR hassle. What’s Facebook’s incentive here? What content are they supposed to ban, and why is that content so popular with Burmese people?

> What’s Facebook’s incentive here

Corporate inertia. There wasn't clear ownership within FB to manage these kinds of political minefields back then. You have to remember that this was the 2010-2015 timeframe and social media was riding high due to the impact it had during the Arab Spring only a couple years prior.

> why is that content so popular with Burmese people

Because society in Myanmar is extremely communalized, with both ethnic strife among the 70 different ethnic groups and also religious strife between the 4 main religions.

Myanmar has been in a state of civil war since independence, and this is further exacerbated by regional powers fueling the flames by supporting militias along with the army.

I would say corporate inertia but also a mix of corporate immaturity and single minded incentives.

Meta’s corporate culture is single mindedly focused on engagement. They don’t care about side effects or other ambitions. They don’t have a corporate structure that encourages anything else that may be beneficial to their consumer base.

It means that anything that detracts from that engagement is counter to any personal goals an employee might have. And if you can’t personally relate to the problem, you’re far less likely to put your career on the line to push for something that runs contrary to the singular goal of engagement.

> Meta’s corporate culture is single mindedly focused on engagement. They don’t care about side effects or other ambitions. They don’t have a corporate structure that encourages anything else that may be beneficial to their consumer base.

I dont really see how that is unique to Meta though. The mandate of any corporation is essentially sociopathic. Unless the leaders really go out of their way for the company to behave in ways that are perhaps good for people (customer or not) and bad for the company the company is just going to be as selfish as it can be.

I didn’t say it’s unique. I just said it is.

what is unique is combining it with metas scale and ubiquity in the space of social media. Especially in developing countries where they subverted net neutrality to become the de facto source of information.

Meta could incentivize other metrics like consumer mental health, accessibility or subject education as well. Those are harder to track, so I’m not saying it’s easy, but other companies have done it.

Meta just does not care or want to care. They’ve been told point blank for over a decade now that they need to do something and haven’t unless regulatory bodies start threatening them.

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