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Daily Beast: Facebook Silences Rohingya Reports of Ethnic Cleansing

S

Shiggy

Member
Rohingya activists—in Burma and in Western countries—tell The Daily Beast that Facebook has been removing their posts documenting the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people in Burma (also known as Myanmar). They said their accounts are frequently suspended or taken down.
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Facebook is an essential platform in Burma; since the country’s infrastructure is underdeveloped, people rely on it the way Westerners rely on email. Experts often say that in Burma, Facebook is the internet—so having your account disabled can be devastating.
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Laura Haigh, Amnesty International’s Burma researcher, told The Daily Beast there appears to be a targeted campaign in Burma to report Rohingya accounts to Facebook and get them shut down.

Mohammad Anwar, a Kuala Lumpur-based Rohingya activist and journalist with the site RohingyaBlogger.com, told The Daily Beast that Facebook has repeatedly deleted his posts about violence in Rakhine State, and has threatened to disable his account.
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One screenshot shows a post from Anwar about military activity in Burma’s Rakhine State, where most of the country’s Rohingya people live. It’s also where the Burmese military focuses its attacks.

The post, which Anwar published on Aug. 28, noted that Burmese military helicopters were flying over Rohingya villages in the Maungdaw District of Rakhine State.

“We removed the post below because it doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards,” read a message from Facebook over the post, which alerted him it had been deleted.

The same day, Anwar posted about members of the Burmese military burning down a Rohingya Hamlet in the Maungdaw District. That post was also removed, with the same message from Facebook citing Community Standards.
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Another Burmese Muslim who spoke with The Daily Beast, Aung Tin, is from the Pathi ethnic minority group. He lives in Canada, and posts frequently on Facebook about the persecution of Burmese Muslims. He said his account has been shut down more than 10 times, and his account was frozen for a month after he wrote a post criticizing the Burmese Home Minister.

In another case, Aung Tin said he put up a post criticizing a young Burmese soldier for posting a photo of himself brandishing a gun and threatening to kill Muslims. Aung Tin wrote on Facebook that the Burmese government had “poisoned the whole country.” “I was banned for one month for that comment,” he told The Daily Beast.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-rohingya-activists-say-facebook-silences-them


Why am I just not surprised?
 
C

Cagey

Banned
Derwind said:
Facebook is pure evil. Like how do you silence someone reporting on ethnic cleansing?
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Laura Haigh, Amnesty International's Burma researcher, told The Daily Beast there appears to be a targeted campaign in Burma to report Rohingya accounts to Facebook and get them shut down.
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I'd guess this is an instance of incompetence among some people in whatever department got tasked with complaint intake upon getting flooded with complaints about selected accounts in what The Daily Beast reported is a targeted campaign, rather than the corporation being pure evil.

The extrapolation is a bit much.
 
J

JonnyDBrit

Member
Oh, so peddling Russian propaganda is fine, but informing on a rapidly escalating crime against hummanity is unsuitable for the platform?

Kinda damning.
 
W

wenis

Registered for GAF on September 11, 2001.
sphagnum said:
I hope Zuck doesn't still think he can run for office after all the nonsense Facebook has been doing.
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an orange turd hole continued to run his political campaign after being accused of sexual harassment, bigotry, shady business dealings with a foreign government and generally being a piece of shit and won.

Zuckerberg will still run.
 
B

bionic77

Member
Is it possible they banned some of this because it was way too graphic (like videos of killing children)?

Not giving FB any benefit of the doubt based on their past behavior, they need to explain WTF this is about, but I wonder if that is the reason they were taking the accounts down.
 
D

DarkJediKnight

Member
Everyone is trying to silence these people.

I've seen pictures of children with their heads severed. Fucking children!!! This is plain and simple an extermination of a group of people.
 
E

Earthbound64

Banned
Facebook is an essential platform in Burma; since the country’s infrastructure is underdeveloped, people rely on it the way Westerners rely on email. Experts often say that in Burma, Facebook is the internet—so having your account disabled can be devastating.
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The fact that people gave Facebook all that power in the first place is baffling.
Like, it's just a website - there are millions of other websites.
 
U

Ushojax

Should probably not trust the 7-11 security cameras quite so much
wenis said:
an orange turd hole continued to run his political campaign after being accused of sexual harassment, bigotry, shady business dealings with a foreign government and generally being a piece of shit and won.

Zuckerberg will still run.
Click to expand...

He'll run and he'll probably win, he's filthy rich. There is nothing the American people admire more than wealth.
 
D

D i Z

Member
Sounds like that particular regional dept of Facebook is down with that agenda and need to be investigated.
 
L

Lyon N. Laap

Member
Earthbound64 said:
The fact that people gave Facebook all that power in the first place is baffling.
Like, it's just a website - there are millions of other websites.
Click to expand...

Facebook is relatively simple to use, allows for cobstabt contact with people who could be days or weeks away, and is common enough that one can not unfairly assume another uses it.

In a country with little stable communication infrastructure where it may also be hard to travel distances due to other infrastructural deficiencies such as in roads, it's not hard for me to see why it's so popular and necessary. Sure, people could transition to another website, but there's no guarantee conditions would be better or that they could effectively transition the wide population to it.

But yeah this situation is terrible, and Facebook should see to it that these people can document and get the word out there about these atrocities.
 
Hesemonni

Hesemonni

Banned
The stuff happening to Rohingya people is just horrible and made even worse by the fact that ones suffering the most are children.

There's no way the hundreds of thousands of people having fled to Bangladesh are ever going to be able to go back and quite frankly I don't know what Bangladesh is going to do with the situation.
 
S

Skellig Gra

Member
Earthbound64 said:
The fact that people gave Facebook all that power in the first place is baffling.
Like, it's just a website - there are millions of other websites.
Click to expand...

It's not hard to see why Facebook became "The Internet" for hundreds of millions of people. Its so easy to never make an effort to find news at the source. Just see what your friends are looking at and thats the reality you now live in.
 
F

FlutterPuffs

Member
Shadowhelper said:
Wow.

Facebook openly promoting genocide?

Unfucking believable.

Why is the world coming together to allow this genocide to happen?
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I dont think that's what's happening.

Probably news of the ethnic cleansing is getting reported by the Myanmar government, and those posts are being flagged and taken down. Which is more due to incompetency on Facebook's part.

Although there's another reason the reports can be taken down, probably if it has graphic pictures in the headline of the status.
 
entremet

entremet

Member
Earthbound64 said:
The fact that people gave Facebook all that power in the first place is baffling.
Like, it's just a website - there are millions of other websites.
Click to expand...

Facebook has network effects, ease of use, free web page creation, free discussion group creation, easy to use marketplace listings, and gaming timewasters.

FB is a rather compelling product, otherwise, it wouldn't be so popular.
 
F

Fezan

Member
This is not the first time this has happened. Posts were also deleted about civilians killing and other atrocities in Kashmir citing community standards
 
S

Slackbladder

Member
Governments abusing Facebook for their own ends. How unsurprising. Add the fact that Facebook is wholly ill-prepared and lacking in direction when dealing with this and you've got a massive, ugly fuck-up.
 
S

Shadowhelper

Banned
Fezan said:
This is not the first time this has happened. Posts were also deleted about civilians killing in Kashmir.
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Is this true?

Damn. It just seems like Facebook is racist and seems to like ignoring the killings of suppressed peoples.

Kashmiris and Rohingya are among the worlds most oppressed. I guess Facebooks simply doesn't care about genocide and massacres against Muslim minorities. I guess our Western media doesn't really care either.
 
M

M3d10n

Member
FlutterPuffs said:
Although there's another reason the reports can be taken down, probably if it has graphic pictures in the headline of the status.
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It's hard to avoid posting graphic pictures when you want to get the world out that entire villages are being napalm'd and children are being beheaded. So the worse it gets, the more censored and deleted the posts are. Which is fucking insane.
 
J

Jackpot

Banned
They deleted a fucking poem.

A while, a minute, a finger’s snap
In this is too short period,
All the earned wealth of years—
All are destroyed within this too short period.
What should we save? a ration?
What should we save? dignity?
Run for my life, save my child?
I don’t know what should I do.
I had to run away with whatever I could take
Until I fell.
I was tired, and I looked back.
Our homes were being swallowed by fire.
We build shelter wherever we can.
Though it doesn’t block the rain or the sun’s rays,
The elders protect the children from Myanmar’s armed forces.
Parents want to protect their children.
Parents want to feed their children.
A parent’s love and kindness are beyond comparison.
But plates are empty.

“We removed this content because it doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards,” read a message from Facebook over that poem, announcing it was being deleted.
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S

soco

Member
I'm torn on this issue. To the people actually going through and making the choices on these posts, there's probably not enough context or not enough clear difference between this and like pictures of beheadings. It's not exactly easy to make policy which can be universally applied for issues like these. For all the people that are outraged, a lot of people don't want this stuff appearing in their feeds. It's one thing to seek it out, but to have it pushed to you is something very different.

Facebook clearly isn't the place to document this, despite the fact that some people want to use it for that.
 
S

siddx

Magnificent Eager Mighty Brilliantly Erect Registereduser
It's a targeted campaign where people, likely hired by the Burmese government or other sympathetic parties, spam "report this post" to such an extent that Facebook has no choice but to remove it. If you want to argue that the system for removing posts based on complaints is poor, that statement has merit. However, the idea that zukerberg or any Facebook employee is going through posts about rohingya and deleting content themselves is ridiculous.
 
O

oti

Banned
sphagnum said:
I hope Zuck doesn't still think he can run for office after all the nonsense Facebook has been doing.
Click to expand...

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

You're joking, right? You're talking about a nation that voted Trump into office. This is nothing.
 
F

Fezan

Member
Shadowhelper said:
Is this true?

Damn. It just seems like Facebook is racist and seems to like ignoring the killings of suppressed peoples.

Kashmiris and Rohingya are among the worlds most oppressed. I guess Facebooks simply doesn't care about genocide and massacres against Muslim minorities. I guess our Western media doesn't really care either.
Click to expand...

here is the link
Link
 
S

Shadow Puppetry

Member
reKon said:
when your post gets deleted are you notified about it? Does Facebook always let the user know?
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Yep, I've never posted any sexual or nudity pics but for some odd reason they notified me they deleted a post due to it being against the standards. I questioned them what picture they were talking about and a few days later were all "so sorry it wasn't against it lol"

I mostly post pictures of my bunnies...
 
K

Kelsdesu

Member
Wait. So "jew hater" is okay, but this isn't? Youtube takes down nazi getting knocked out, but Eric Garner clip stays up for a cool minute?
 
G

GoldenEye 007

Member
Facebook and other social platforms are just about out of excuses. They seem to be in bed with everything evil and they're saying and doing little to nothing to address it.
 
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