False Facebook reports about an alleged rape that triggered a fatal riot in Myanmar remained online for hours after delays reaching the one “Burmese guy” in the company’s Dublin office who could understand the content, a new book claims.
The claims about the incident in 2014 were made in a memoir criticising Facebook by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat who was once the company’s director of global public policy.
The one Burmese speaker on Facebook’s team in Dublin at the time compared with hundreds of company officials responsible for China, she writes. The company now says it is building a team “dedicated to Myanmar”.
Ms Wynn-Williams’s book Careless People highlights the central role of Facebook’s operation in Ireland in the monitoring and moderating content on a vast social media network used by more than three billion people worldwide.
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She devotes a chapter to the malign influence of dangerous Facebook posts in Myanmar, the southeast Asian country controlled by a military junta. Virulent hate speech was mostly targeted at the persecuted Muslim minority Rohingya people, the book says.
The junta blocked Facebook in July 2014 when a riot was set off by a post claiming a Buddhist woman had been raped by a Muslim man who owned a tea shop.
A later UN document found the report was fabricated but it went viral after it was circulated by Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk described as the “Burmese Bin Laden”.
Ms Wynn-Williams received an email saying the junta wanted Facebook to remove the disputed posts because they were causing violence – “riots are ongoing, Buddhist mobs are attacking Muslim shops, people are dying”.
However, she said the content moderation team in Dublin didn’t want to take down the posts. “The case officer tells us she doesn’t think they violate our rules, but she can’t find anyone who speaks Burmese, and Google Translate doesn’t do Burmese, so she can’t say for sure.”
A more senior official then sought contact with a company contractor hired some months before – “a Burmese guy based in Dublin” – to review the material. “Five hours pass,” she writes.
The contractor was offline so the senior official phoned him. “The Burmese contractor is at a restaurant and I’m told he’ll go home and ‘should have access to a PC in fifteen minutes’. He’ll comb through the posts to try to see what is being said, and if we would action it or not.”
After two more hours passed, the senior official said the contractor did not have his work laptop and the senior official was himself on the road.
Ms Wynn-Williams said she ultimately found a way to get others to take down the posts from the Facebook’s headquarters in California “but to do that we need the senior guy to send the links that have been reported”.
Facebook was unblocked in Myanmar four minutes later, even though it was 4.30am there.
Facebook, now known as Meta, said concerning the Myanmar incident: “The facts here have been a matter of public record since at least 2018, and we have said publicly we know we were too slow to act on abuse on our services in Myanmar.”
