In a blogpostyesterday evening , social medium giant Facebook announced several changes meant to mitigate the effects of misinformation and hate speech causing real - world violence , including the formation of a Strategic Response team meant to discontinue a repeat of what happened in Myanmar .
Myanmar , whereless than 1 - percentof the population had cyberspace access as recently as 2014 , became a Gods Must Be Crazy - similar testbed for Facebook . For many in the region , Facebook is their one and only mean to get data online . It ’s also , in Facebook’sown words , “ the only country in the world with a significant online bearing that has n’t standardized on Unicode”—meaning many of the stilted intelligence tools meant to weed out harmful content plainly did n’t work there . Couple that with a want of aboriginal speaker unit act as moderator , imperfect civil liberties , and racial latent hostility and it ’s fiddling wonder Facebook played astarring rolein stirring up an on-going genocide there .
https://gizmodo.com/whatsapp-puts-new-limit-on-message-forwarding-in-effort-1831929288
Photo: Francois Mori (AP)
like incident have cropped up in Sri Lanka , India , and elsewhere . The ship’s company foretell last November , as it always seems to be doing of late , to do better .
The first fruits of those labors are the Strategic Response squad — a group of individuals who , harmonise to coverage by NBC , let in “ former diplomats , human rights investigator , a former military intelligence officer and one person who apprise crude giant BP on geopolitical risk . ” Facebook did not deal how many hoi polloi in reality comprise the squad , but a appendage of the Myanmar Tech Accountability web who has worked with the team claim they number less than ten . Facebook first became aware of its complicity in Myanmar ’s Rohingya genocideat least five class ago .
( Speaking to NBC , the head of the Strategic Response squad , Rosa Birch , said , “ there ’s a lot of similarities there between administration and military and Facebook , ” an alarming affirmation at a time when Facebook is also working onminting its own money . )
sure enough Facebook is doing more than putting together some perfunctory advisory committee a la its ridiculous praseodymium plays at election security measure “ war rooms , ” right-hand ? Barely . The company ’s top agenda token is that it will be “ take away bad actors and unsound substance . ” Some version of that phrase has appeared in dozens of insistency releases from Facebook — second only to possibly “ continue to improve”—and does n’t prompt much authority compared to the seriousness of — and I ca n’t accentuate this enough — genuine genocide .
There ’s some drive for optimism , in that Facebook ’s ( self - describe ) stats on catching tough subject globally went up by around 8 - pct ; Facebook is also in the appendage of staff up Burmese speakers transition Myanmar to Unicode . handwriting in glove with actually enforcing its own long - stand policies , the company claims it ’s continue to restrain distribution of contentedness that come on what ’s off limits . Reason being : interior enquiry paint a picture that “ borderline ” content was being honor with increase engagement , incentivizing the exact untimely sort of doings .
The only discreet change Facebook deigned to tell users that it ’s unforced to make , though , is “ add together rubbing ” to Facebook Messenger by determine the phone number of times a content can be forwarded . Chain messages , including those containing icon and memes stand for to inspire violence , were at the heart of issues in Myanmar , Sri Lanka , and let ’s be honest , probably America too . According to TechCrunch ( Facebook did n’t even bother to measure it in its own post ) , the limitis five people , the same terminus ad quem it places onWhatsAppmessage furtherance in India .
Forgive me if none of these solutions seem up to the task of undo the price Facebook ’s misinformation machine has already wrought abroad . As an unrelated reminder , here’sthe link for deleting your Facebook account , if you still have one and experience so inclined .
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