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Comment by botanical | Hacker News Reader

Facebook didn't remove posts promoting ethnic violence in a timeous manner. In fact, it did the opposite, its algorithms promoted these types of inflamed posts to increase user engagement. It's not hard to understand why Meta is responsible unless you're being disingenuous; you didn't touch on that aspect. Facebook is not some harmless message transceiver. And not to mention, Facebook didn't have sufficient native speakers to moderate the content. So at worst, they're negligent.

There are responsibilities to allowing people on your platform and having them speak to the internet; free speech is not absolute.

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The article mentions a murderous Mynamarese monk [0]. I think he is responsible. And people like him.

There is a real question here about whether Facebook's algorithms created the zeitgeist or just reflected it. Since most countries have Facebook and most countries are avoiding Facebook-fueled mass murder sprees, I suspect it is more that their algorithms accurately reflected what a large number of people were thinking.

It is an interesting question, and maybe there will be compelling arguments made in Part II. But that hasn't happened in Part I.

[0] The gap that can emerge between the priests of a religion and the religious ideals would stun the naive. If this article is accurate then the man might be an anti-Buddha.

This is pretty damning:

> As the violence in Mandalay worsens, the head of Deloitte in Myanmar gets an urgent call. Zaw Htay, the official spokesman of Myanmar’s president, needs help reaching Meta. The Deloitte executive works into the night trying to get someone to respond, but never gets through. On the third day of rioting, the government gets tired of waiting and blocks access to Facebook in Mandalay. The block works — the riots died down. And the Deloitte guy’s inbox suddenly fills with emails from Meta staffers wanting to know why Facebook has been blocked

The article mentioned that the zeitgeist was that the communities lived in peaceful indifference, but political and religious leaders with hate, only through the mass communication ability of Facebook, were able to leverage their authority status to radicalize the common man to believe a funny hateful man on the Internet over their local customs and mores.

The ideas people are exposed to can shape their own ideas. That’s how ideas work.

what happens when the algorithms decide which ideas you see

genocide in this case

I think it's a fine line between "people shouldn't be exposed to bad ideas" and "people shouldn't be exposed to good ideas"

Leaders calling for racial genocide isn't really at that "fine end". Meta should be able to distinguish between that and "corporations should pay less taxes".

should your ISP be able to distinguish between these? Should WhatsApp or your encrypted messengers? Should your mobile phone providers?

My ISP should not be promoting posts advocating for genocide at me, absolutely yes!!

when the government blocked facebook, the riots stopped very quickly… it was fairly clear and this is just the first half

> There is a real question here about whether Facebook's algorithms created the zeitgeist or just reflected it.

That is a false dichotomy. It is possible for Facebook's role to have been to exacerbate existing religious tensions for profit. They are an actor in this story. Not either a "creator" of zeitgeist or an object with no agency.

Last paragraphs of the article:

>They’d been shown example after example of dehumanizing posts and comments calling for mass murder, even explicitly calling for genocide. And David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.

>After all that, Meta decided not to dramatically scale up moderation capacity, to permanently ban the known worst actors, or to make fundamental product-design changes to reliably deviralize posts inciting hatred and violence.

>Instead, in 2016, it was time to get way more people in Myanmar onto Facebook.

>That’s next, in Part II: The Crisis.

These would have been reasonable actions that Meta had a responsibility to take.

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