The Myanmar Genocide and Facebook
by tristero
If ever there was an argument for a liberal arts education, it’s the way our social media are constructed. Here’s one example.
Hardly anyone in the US cares, but finally, the Myanmar genocide was called exactly that by the UN The situation is horrific:
The investigators documented rapes, sexual slavery and abductions, including of children, said panel member Radhika Coomeraswamy.
“The scale, brutality and systematic nature of rape and (sexual) violence indicate that they are part of deliberate strategy to intimidate, terrorise or punish the civilian population. They are used as a tactic of war,” she said.
Implicated in exacerbating the problem is our old friend Facebook whose upper management wouldn’t know a moral value if it came up and bit them on their digitals:
The investigators sharply criticized Facebook, which has become Myanmar’s dominant social media network despite having no employees there, for letting its platform be used to incite violence and hatred.
Facebook responded on Monday by announcing it was blocking 20 Myanmar officials and organizations found by the U.N. panel to have “committed or enabled serious human rights abuses”.
The company already acknowledged this month that it had been “too slow” to respond to incitement in Myanmar, following a Reuters investigative report into its failure to tackle rampant hate speech including calls for all Rohingya to be killed.
“Too slow?” That translates into exactly how many extra rapes, tortures, murders, and enslavements, Mr. Zuckerberg?
“Too slow” is the response of people completely unfamiliar with the complexity and darkness of the human condition. If, at its inception, anyone developing Facebook had read Toni Morrison or Charles Dickens as avidly as they pored over C++ manuals, they would take it as a given that they’d need to design a social platform that could never enable genocide.