- Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook's role in the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar's Rohingya in an interview published on Monday with Vox.
- Zuckerberg said that both Buddhists and the Rohingya were being incited towards violence in messages sent on the website.
- He added that the social media network was able to stop some of it.
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Mark Zuckerberg just laid out Facebook's role in reported 'ethnic cleansing' in Myanmar
Zuckerberg said that both Buddhists and the Rohingya were being incited towards violence in messages sent on the website.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Vox published on Monday that users in Mynamar used the website's Messenger to incite violence and spread hate speech that led to reported "ethnic cleansing" of Rohingya Muslims.
"I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, 'Hey, there's about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.' And then the same thing on the other side," Zuckerberg told Vox's Ezra Klein.
Facebook's role in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya has been publicly known since at least March when UN investigators told the UN
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“Everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar,” said, adding that "the ultra-nationalist Buddhists have their own Facebooks and are really inciting a lot of violence and a lot of hatred against the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities ... I'm afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended."
Other Facebook executives have recently addressed the company's role in the Myanmar crisis.
said in March that 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," Mosseri. "We're trying to take the issue seriously, but we lose some sleep over this."
Mosseri's comments came in response to a question aboutUN investigators saying Facebook played a rolein spreading hate speech in Myanmar.
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