How Facebook Became a Tool for Genocide

this is koutu palang the largest refugee camp in the world there's nearly a million people here it's located here at the southern tip of Bangladesh near a place called Cox's Bazaar the people here are mostly rohinga Muslims a people who now have no country that's because in 2017 the military and citizens in their Homeland Myanmar forced them out in a brutal ethnic cleansing that left thousands dead their homes and Villages burned to the [Music] ground so let me tell you their story how they ended up here and hopefully you'll understand why this video is a

fundraiser for these people to try to lighten their burden Myanmar is no stranger to conflict between its many ethnic groups but the violence that caused the rohinga to flee their homes that forced a million people into this refugee camp was different it was violence that was fueled by hateful messages and disinformation inflammatory fake stories spread by Buddhist nationalists and extremists and even the military of Myanmar these messages were spread and Amplified by one social media platform that swept the country a western tech company that hoped to Corner the market in Mar and profit immensely in

this country a country that was just starting to use the internet let me show you how this happened ultimately this is a story about misinformation and radicalization on the internet there are other bad things that can happen on the internet and I'm going to pause the story right now to tell you about the sponsor of today's video who is in the business of protecting you online thank you nordvpn for sponsoring today's video a VPN is a tool that allows you to connect to the internet but to select a country through which you connect to the

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you're surfing the web there's a link in my description it is nordvpn.com Johny Harris when you click the link it helps support the channel it also gets you 2 years of nordvpn plus four extra months you can try it out you get all your money back within 30 days if you're not satisfied it's a good deal and again it helps support the channel when you sign up thank you norvan for sponsoring today's video and supporting our journalism now let's get back to this very important story about the internet and Facebook in Myanmar Myanmar used to

be called Burma and it used to be closed off to the world for decades it was ruled by military dictators who kept the country closed and poor and oppressed the military dictators belonged to the Burmese Buddhist majority and had a particular fixation on marginalizing the Muslim minority called the rohinga over the years they stripped the rohinga of their rights not letting them move around the country and in the'80s they passed a law that said that these rohinga people were not actually Burmy citizens but then in 2010 in a surprise move things in Myanmar started changing

myanmar's new dawn has been a long time coming the Burmese president has hiled a new chapter in relations with the United States after Decades of isolation new leadership came to power and began opening up the country to the outside world soon cell phones were flooding into the country at an astounding rate jumping from nearly no cell phones in 2006 to 90% penetration by 2016 cell phone towers started popping up all over the place connecting the country to the internet at a Breakneck speed that internet adoption rate explodes from 1 half of 1% to 40% and

I know that might not sound like a lot if you're in the United States and everybody is is on the internet but when you were in a society where no one is online and suddenly half of the country is online that is huge that's my old Vox colleague Max fiser a journalist who recently wrote a book about social media algorithms and their role in stoking extremism in Myanmar and elsewhere like you go to a village and there might only be a few people who have cell phones that have internet access but those people are relaying

what they're seeing there to everyone that they're meeting for Venture backed US tech companies like Facebook looking for new users this overnight internet adoption in Myanmar looked like an opportunity 50 million potential users who are just coming online for the first time so Facebook made deals with local phone providers making it so that smartphones came pre-loaded with the Facebook app and that these new internet users could browse Facebook for free without using any of their expensive mobile data more and more people spread online and alongside that Facebook rapidly spread throughout the country I remember that

number 40% internet adoption rate well almost the exact same proportion the country 38% in 2016 says that they primarily get their news from Facebook that's huge 38% is way bigger than any media source that I can think of in the United States by this huge proportion for most people in Myanmar Facebook was the internet Facebook was the news and almost immediately videos like this start showing up I [Music] this is ashin Wu a Buddhist monk who is the leader of the 969 movement it's an extremist movement that focuses on the rohinga spreading conspiracy theories about

them how they're invading the country how they're planning to destroy the Burmese people watatu called himself the Burmese Bin Laden and he made a career out out of becoming an anti- ringia preacher one of his main methods was always paper pamphlets and leaflets he would distribute these throughout the country to spread his lies and his conspiracies about the rohinga but in 2003 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for all of this hate speech but he was released early in 2012 right as Myanmar was changing opening up becoming connected to the internet as Wu

entered burmes Society he found a new tool to spread his anti- ringa messages an algorithm designed to serve users content that will engage them that will outrage them that will keep them on the platform for as long as possible so that a tech company in California can sell ads and make money so the thing that the Facebook algorithm learns to promote in Myanmar very quickly is hatred of the Muslim minority over the next few years weu found a home for his hate speech on Facebook and YouTube but mostly Facebook which had quickly become the country's

favorite social media platform this significantly Amplified his reach to hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in the country and he was just one of many spreading lies and conspiracies about the rohinga heat speech conspiracies and incitements to violence all directed at the country's Muslim minority are just overrunning the platform over the next 5 years tension between the Burmese Buddhist majority and the rohinga Muslim minority turn more and more violent as the country grapples with the rapid change in economic growth associated with opening up to the world this tension and racism in no way was caused

by Facebook but it was on Facebook that a troubling pattern started to emerge somewhere in the country there's a crime it's allegedly committed by some rohinga person like the alleged assault assault and murder of a Burmese Woman by a group of rohinga men news of the crime spreads like wildfire some of it making it onto social media remember Facebook was the news for many people and of course we all know what happens on the internet as it spreads the story changes conspiracies emerge that the rohinga are stockpiling weapons or that they are actually foreign Invaders

and that they're planning to take over anti- rohinga voices with big followings chime in saying that this is proof of what they've been saying all along the rohinga are planning to take over the country and they must be expelled and soon the fight goes from social media to the doorsteps of the rohinga people themselves a state of emergency has been declared in Western Burma where deadly clashes between Buddhists and Muslims have killed at least 17 people hundreds of homes were set Al light the first massive outbreak of violence in this era happened in 2012 we're

burning Ring's houses because they live near our village and they gather at night and try to attack us ordinary Burmese citizens heed the call raiding rohinga Villages and burning them to the ground the security forces had to step in but not to stop the violence instead to help the destruction Witnesses report that the security forces wouldn't let the rohinga extinguish the fire that was burning down their houses even when they tried they just stood by and let it happen from this 2012 incident which is kind of the beginning of our story the government officially reported

that 192 people were killed 86 00 homes destroyed but experts say that the numbers are almost certainly much higher 140,000 rohinga were forced to leave their home many fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh Facebook didn't play a huge role in this first major outbreak of violence back in 2012 the platform was new and just getting started but this pattern of conspiracies and rumors spreading on the platform and then leading to real world violence that pattern continued to grow as more and more people got on Facebook and soon it would play a role in helping Buddhist extremists commit

what many call [Music] genocide so where's Facebook the company in all of this there was this journalist and digital researcher Ella Kellen was in Myanmar conducting research on a Stanford Fellowship looking into hate speech online and she's seen this pattern emerge she's so alarmed she flies all the way back to Silicon Valley to meet with people at Facebook to say hey this is really dangerous it's really bad it turns out she learns in that meeting that Facebook has exactly one moderator who speaks burmes which is one of the many languages spoken in myammar which basically

means it's entirely ungoverned Ken attempts to sound the alarm she's warning them in this meeting with Facebook Executives this is really dangerous what you were doing is really destabilizing for this country at a really fragile and really tenuous moment and they basically do nothing and this happens over and over again in the 4 years between when Facebook arrives in Myanmar and when the genocide starts this was a part of a larger Trend not just from Facebook but the whole International Community they didn't want to focus on the dark side of what was going on in

Myanmar they wanted to focus on the positive aspects myanmar's miraculous and sudden opening up to the world the world's attitude is hey this was a extreme authoritarian military dictatorship closed off from the outside world that is opening up they're having elections they're having democracy they're turning away from China towards the West isn't this great just a month after this first spat of violence President Obama visits Myanmar and meets with the government foreign companies continue to invest in the economy of Myanmar and Facebook's presence as a key source of information continues to spread but under the

surface in the algorithmic feeds of millions of users hate and conspiracy was being rewarded with attention the algorithm feeding it to more and more users enraging them inflaming them confirming their beliefs and their biases according to Human Rights campaigners 20 Muslim Students were murdered here in March when religious violence swept through this city in central Myanmar Wu's audience kept growing into the hundreds of thousands his speeches reaching a larger and larger audience in the patter continued in the town of mtila an argument in a muslim-owned gold shop turned into a brawl leaving a Buddhist man

injured Buddhist extremists post inciting messages on Facebook saying that more attacks are coming that the rohinga are dangerous and once again what started in the news feed turns into a violent Buddhist mob roaming the streets forcing people out of their homes burning mosques to the ground killing dozens and once again the security Security Forces largely stand by allowing another massacre in fact the military starts to participate in a new way restricting the movement of the rohinga forcing them into camps and not letting them leave in response to these conditions some rohinga form an Insurgency group

and start fighting back but they're totally outmatched extremism on Facebook continues to grow and in March of 2014 Ellen once again makes the trip to Silicon Valley to deliver a warning hate speech and disinformation are spreading on the platform and it will lead to violence but once again Facebook did nothing they still only had one burmes Speaking moderator who wasn't even in the country who was expected to keep all of this under control and sure enough a few months later wiu uses Facebook to Target a Muslim tea shop telling lies about the owners and giving

his followers their name and address hundreds of followers take to the street burning down Muslim owned businesses and killing two the violence mostly targeting the minority rohinga Community has killed more than 200 people and made 140,000 hopeless Facebook still wouldn't step in so the Myanmar government had to they blocked Facebook in the city of Mandalay where the violence was happening it was the strongest warning yet that Facebook was indeed driving violence in the country this and more warnings from experts was a wakeup call but Facebook only ends up making promises but takes no aggressive action

to stop hate speech on their platform and they continue to focus what they're good at growth and expansion the thing that will make them money in 2016 a think tank in Washington DC releases a report that analyzes 32,000 Facebook accounts in Myanmar these were accounts of everyday users and the report found that these accounts were overwhelmed with hateful messages against the rohinga and just when you think that Facebook's enabling role couldn't get any worse the milit of Myanmar joins the platform they create Pages pretending to be news sites or beauty and lifestyle Pages they gain

huge followings and then they sprinkle in propaganda they amplify the tensions between Buddhists and rohinga they post graphic photos of corpses saying that the rohinga were attacking that jihadist attacks would be carried out any day and the conspiracies kept getting more and more extreme oh yeah the Muslims in my Village are stockpiling guns at the beest of Saudi Arabia and and they're they're going to take over unless we go and kill them first and it would get thousands of shares so what we're looking at is Facebook not just amplifying hate speech posted by the average

citizen or by extremists but the platform being used as a tool of psychological warfare by a military trying to create fear and mistrust in its own people it was a giant escalating mob hatred towards the rohinga which wasn't new in Myanmar these ethnic tensions go back decades but it was different now because the mob in this case wasn't just someone's Village or Community it was the entire country being viewed through the lens of a technology that serves up the most extreme and engaging content that polarizes in the name of Engagement it was a ticking Time

Bomb one that went off in 2016 and [Music] 2017 because the rohinga insurgents were fighting back in 2016 the military starts performing what they call clearance operations going Village to Village burning down homes and driving the rohinga out these clearance operations lead to the death of hundreds of rohinga 990,000 more people are forced to flee their home over the border to a refugee camp in Bangladesh and once again they meet little to no push back from their government or the International Community they now had a Playbook it was a new level of violence not just

from the polarized people but now from the military itself seeing this violence break out in early 2017 d David Madden who ran a tech startup in Myanmar traveled to Facebook headquarters to give them a final warning that their platform is spreading hate and that the situation in Myanmar is getting really bad this was his second time delivering such a warning but like all the others before him he was ignored a few months later it's the summer of 2017 and watatu is ated again visiting rakine state where the rohinga live delivering one of his signature hateful

sermons which is being Amplified by local media and of course his Following on Facebook the next month rohinga insurgents launch another attack on security forces in rakine state the attacks lead to 12 security Personnel [Music] deaths and this was the final justification that the military was looking for to do what they had been planning and plotting for years it happened quickly and violently armed men marched from Village to Village across rine state in one of these clearance operations they were joined by civilians feeling more justified in their racism than ever it's a chilling and detailed

account of what can only be described as a premeditated Massacre and together the military and the civilians kicked down doors they burned down homes and mosques they killed indiscriminately committing horrific acts of violence the Rampage was widespread and systematic theja villagers had fled in Terror when troops and their own Buddhist neighbor rampaged into chenar and then torched it hundreds of villages burned to the ground this Geo dat obtained through satellite imagery shows the areas that were burned and destroyed by this extermination campaign and it helps us see just how widespread this was it was Swift

and violent it was systematic and it was an effort Led Out by the military and joined by local people who had been radicalized for years by anti- ringia prop propaganda more and more of it being spread throughout the country by the unmonitored algorithms of [Music] Facebook tens of thousands of rohinga killed and over 700,000 fleeing for their lives ending up in a refugee camp in Bangladesh to outside observers this event might have looked like spontaneous violence but this was actually the result of a coordinated campaign by a few key people with access to technology that

allowed them to reach Millions to lie to them in the most hateful ways to warp their realities it was a full-scale ethnic cleansing and it was in part fueled and enabled by an ungoverned social media platform even after the violence the Burmese military continued to use Facebook writing one post that said that the rohinga problem had actually been an unfinished job that had finally been solved and by solved he means the organized murder of tens of thousands of innocent people and the forced expulsion of almost a million of them the UN would refer to this

campaign as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing others used the word genocide and only after this horrific event did Facebook actually respond it wasn't until 2018 when they finally took down the pages of senior military officials who were spreading lies and calls to violence on their platform the UN came in to investigate how this happened how another genocide happened on our watch They concluded that Facebook had been quote a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate they also noted that Facebook declined to share with them data that would have helped with their [Music] investigation

in 2021 these military leaders who were responsible for this ethnic cleansing of the rohinga people they took over the country again they removed the elected government and yet another coup koutu palang the refugee camp in Bangladesh now holds over 1 million people most of them rohinga fleeing the violence in their home country the government of Bangladesh wants to return them to Myanmar but International observers and the rohinga themselves say that there's no way they could do that safely after all the government in power is the one that massacred them returning to Myanmar now would be

more dangerous than ever so they sit in their refugee camp without a country and without support which is why we are raising as much money as we can to support them Facebook claims that they changed their practices since the massacre of 2017 but in 2022 just last year Global witness did an investigation and they were able to place ads on Facebook that contained hateful messages in the Burmese language Facebook didn't reject any of those ads whereas here in the United States or in Brazil Facebook seems to have real controls for hateful ads but it appears

not in Myanmar even after all this this story in some ways is specific to me Myanmar it's a country that had been closed off to the world for a long time it opened up it was newly connected to the internet and soon long-standing tensions between ethnic groups exploded but in other ways this is a story about humans everywhere about how we've chosen to build our society around technology and social media platforms that are supposed to connect us and they do and yet in the process we've learned just how much they also create division spread disinformation

and limit our ability to live in a shared reality it's a story about how that process that trade-off can have deadly [Music] consequences [Music]