Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has promised to hire more Burmese-language content reviewers to clamp down on hate speech against Rohingyas and also work with civil society to identify and ban “specific hate figures”.
In a marathon hearing before a joint meeting of two Senate panels on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO was questioned about the social network’s role in spreading hate and violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Senator Patrick J Leahy of Vermont referred to a report by UN investigators that blamed Facebook for playing a role in inciting possible “genocide” in Myanmar and also raised the issue of death threats against a Myanmar journalist that spread on Facebook in 2016.
“The threat went straight through your detection system, it spread very quickly, and then it took attempt after attempt after attempt, and the involvement of civil society groups, to get you to remove it,” said the Senator, adding “Why couldn't it be removed within 24 hours?”.
Calling the violence in Myanmar a “terrible tragedy”, Mr Zuckerberg listed three specific steps being taken by his company to ensure something like this does not happen again.
He said the company is hiring dozens of more Burmese-language content reviewers, “because hate speech is very language-specific”.
“It's hard to do it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically,” he said.
He said they are working with civil society in Myanmar to identify specific hate figures so that they can take down their accounts, rather than specific pieces of content.
Also, the company is standing up a product team to do specific product changes in Myanmar and other countries that may have similar issues in the future to prevent this from happening.
Last week, a few human rights groups working on Myanmar had shared detailed information with US lawmakers on how the social network helped spread hate speech in the country. It highlighted several examples of alleged negligence by Facebook, particularly a video about the controversial rape and murder of a Burmese woman.
Before being removed from Facebook, the video had already been viewed more than 120,000 times, according to the information provided to lawmakers.
A recent survey had found that nearly 38 percent of Facebook users in Burma got their news through the site.
Last month a team of UN investigators declared that the social network had played a “determining role” in Myanmar and “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict”.
“As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” the fact-finding mission’s chairman Marzuki Darusman had said.
The Facebook founder had to face some hard questions on the alleged misuse of his platform in the 2016 US elections and he personally apologised for it saying: “I started Facebook, I run it and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
The questioning will continue before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.