I think people have seen me link to reports about Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar. I think this one in The Chaos Machine is interesting because of the timing. It happened in 2014, which means they knew very well what they were doing in 2016 and beyond.
[Religious extremist Wirathu] urged the government to raid Nuslims homes and mosques in a preemptive strike—a common demand of genocidaires, whose implies
message is that regular citizens must do what the authorities will not. The post went viral, dominating feeds across the country. Outraged users joined in the froth, urging one another to wipe out their Muslim neighbors. Hundreds rioted in Mandalay, attacking Muslim businesses and
owners, killing two people and wounding many more.
As the riots spread, a senior government official called someone he
knew at the Myanmar office of Deloitte, a consulting firm, to ask for help in contacting Facebook. But neither could reach anyone at the company. In desperation, the government blocked access to Facebook in Mandalay, the riots cooled. The next day, officials at Facebook finally responded to the Deloitte representative, not to inquire after the violence but to ask if he knew why the platform had been blocked. In a meeting two weeks later with the government official and others, a Facebook representative said
that they were working to improve their responsiveness to dangerous content in Myanmar. But if the company made any changes, the effect was undetectable on its platform. As soon as the government lifted its virtual blockade, hate speech, and Wirathu's audience, only grew. "From at least that Mandalay incident, Facebook knew," David Madden, an Australian who ran Myanmar's largest tech-startup accelerator, told McLaughlin, the
reporter. "That's not 20/20 hindsight. The scale of this problem was significant and it was already apparent."
Either unable or unwilling to consider that its product might be dangerous, Facebook continued expanding its reach in Myanmar and other developing and under-monitored countries. It moored itself entirely to a self-enriching Silicon Valley credo that Schmidt had recited on that early
Visit to Yangon: "The answer to bad speech is more speech. More communication, more voices.