2023-08-25 09:11:25
“Meta must immediately compensate the Rohingya community for the role Facebook played in the ethnic cleansing of this persecuted minority group” Amnesty International said today, the sixth anniversary of the Myanmar army’s brutal operation in which Rohingya women and girls were raped, entire villages burned down and thousands killed.
Facebook’s algorithms and the relentless drive for profit Meta created an echo chamber that contributed to fomenting hatred of the Rohingya population and the conditions that forced the ethnic group to flee Myanmar en masse.
“Six years have passed since Meta contributed to the terrible atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya population. However, despite the fact that it stands out as one of the most egregious examples of the involvement of a social media company in a human rights crisis, the Rohingya community continues to expect compensation from Meta,” said Pat de Brún, head of the Area of Accountability of Large Technological Companies at Amnesty International.”
“Our investigations have made it clear that Facebook’s dangerous algorithms, programmed to drive ‘engagement’ and business profits at any costactively fanned the flames of hatred and contributed to mass violence, as well as the forced displacement of more than half of Myanmar’s Rohingya population to neighboring Bangladesh.”
“It is time for Meta to assume its responsibilities by compensating the Rohingya population and correcting its business model to prevent this from happening again.”
In addition, August 25 also represents an important step in the accountability of large technology companies for their impacts on human rights, since it is the date on which they entered into force for the main online platforms of the European Union (EU). key provisions of the Digital Services Act, a landmark piece of legislation intended to strengthen rights in the digital age, which could create a ripple effect far beyond the EU.
A personal plea to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg
Today Amnesty International and Al Jazeera publish a poignant first-person account of Rohingya refugee Maung Sawyeddollah, who was forced to flee his village in Myanmar when he was just a teenager. He fled through burnt-out villages and fields littered with corpses, and currently lives in the largest refugee camp in the world, Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladeshalong with around a million Rohingyas.
As a boy, before hate took root with the help of Facebook, he and his mostly Rohingya Muslim friends would happily play with the mostly Buddhist Rakhine children from the neighboring village. But all that changed when the army arrived.
“I would like to meet Mark Zuckerberg and his team. They may want to come spend a night or two in the refugee camp,” writes Sawyeddollah. “I would say to them: ‘Don’t you see your role in our suffering? We repeatedly asked you to try to help make things better for our people… but you ignored our pleas. Tell me: do you feel something for us? Is it just about the data, is it just about the dollars?”
Additional information
Last year, Amnesty International published a report detailing Meta’s role in atrocities committed against the Rohingya people by the Myanmar army in 2017. This report revealed that even internal Facebook studies dating back to 2012 indicated that Meta knew that its algorithms could do serious damage in the real world.. In 2016, Meta’s own research clearly recognized that “our recommender systems add to the problem” of extremism.
As of August 2017, Myanmar security forces waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim population of Rakhine State of that country and committed thousands of unlawful killings of Rohingyas, including young children; raped Rohingya women and girls, and perpetrated other acts of sexual violence against them; they tortured Rohingya men and boys in detention centers, and torched hundreds of Rohingya villages. The violence pushed more than 700,000 Rohingya — more than half of the Rohingya population living in northern Rakhine state at the start of the crisis — into neighboring Bangladesh.
Meta contributed to serious negative human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya population in the context of the 2017 atrocities in Rakhine State and therefore has a responsibility under international human rights law to provide a remedy cash to the community. This includes making the necessary changes to your business model that can ensure this never happens again. All companies have a responsibility to respect all human rights regardless of where in the world they operate and in all their activities. This is a widely recognized standard of conduct found in international standards on business and human rights, such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN Guiding Principles) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Companies (OECD Guidelines).
The first-person story of Maung Sawyeddollahincluding analysis by Pat de Brún, Head of Big Tech Accountability at Amnesty International.
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