Facebook under scrutiny over hate speech in Myanmar

One of two Muslims allowed to run for the governing party in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s general election on Sunday, Sithu Maung, worries fake news on Facebook could damage his chances.

Within a torrent of racist abuse and misinformation posted about him ahead of the polls are false claims he plans to close Buddhist monastic schools and to advocate for the teaching of Arabic.

“They use race and religion to attack me,” the 33-year-old told the Reuters news agency in the commercial capital of Yangon, where he is standing for a seat won by the governing party in the last election.

“These days people use social media more than ever … and when they see false information 10 times it becomes the truth.”

Social media companies face a global challenge to stop disinformation around elections, including the 2020 US vote.

In Myanmar, the stakes for Facebook are particularly high after previous accusations it helped incite genocide.

Half of Myanmar’s 53 million people use Facebook, which for many is synonymous with the internet.

Facebook executives told Reuters hate speech in Myanmar was “near historic lows” after it invested in resources from artificial intelligence language and photo detection to measures to slow the spread of viral content.

But civil society groups have found dozens of networks of accounts, pages, and groups spreading ethnically and religiously charged falsehoods they fear could lead to strife and undermine the second election since the end of hardline army rule in 2011.

Reuters separately found more than two dozen inter-connected pages and accounts with a combined reach in the hundreds of thousands. The majority were removed after Reuters flagged them to Facebook.

“There’s a short-term immediate concern of all this disinformation and hate speech fuelling real-world violence,” said Jes Kaliebe Petersen, CEO of tech hub Phandeeyar, part of the Myanmar Tech Accountability Network (MTAN), a civil society group coordinating efforts to reduce risks posed by social media.

Harmful content, he said, is “spreading like wildfire”.

The government of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, her governing National League for Democracy (NLD) and the election commission did not respond to requests for comment. — Reuters