Facebook official who oversees the news feed says his team loses sleep over the site's alleged role in Myanmar 'ethnic cleansing'

pulse

March 22, 2018 6:21 PM

"As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media," a UN investigator said.

Workers at Facebook reportedly "lose sleep" over the use of their platform to spread hate speech.
The Facebook executive who oversees the newsfeed algorithm said addressing such content was one of his team's biggest challenges.
Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has expressed reservations about cracking down on speech.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook's vice president of product management, said that Facebook's contribution to ongoing violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar caused his team distress and was something they struggled to address.

Mosseri said the situation in Myanmar, from where more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims fled since August, was "deeply concerning in a lot of different ways" during a recent interview on Slate's technology podcast, If Then.

Mosseri manages the team that oversees the algorithm that controls what people see in their Facebook news feeds. He said real-world violence could be one of the "most concerning and severe negative consequences of any platform."

"Connecting the world isn't always going to be a good thing," he said on the podcast. "W."

Facebook typically works with third-party fact-checkers, but that approach doesn't work in Myanmar because, as far as the company is aware, there are no groups to fill that role in the country, Mosseri said. The company has instead focused on identifying "bad actors" and enforcing its community standards and terms of service to "address the proliferation of some problematic content."

"Everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar," said UN Myanmar investigator Yanghee Lee, adding that while Facebook had helped the impoverished country, it had also been used to spread hate speech.

"A lot of the most sensitive issues that we faced today are conflicts between our real values, right? Freedom of speech and hate speech and offensive content," Zuckerberg said. "Where is the line, right? And the reality is that different people are drawn to different places, we serve people in a lot of countries around the world, a lot of different opinions on that."

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