14,990,931 people follow this . "When the media spotlight has been on there has been talk of changes, but after it passes are we actually going to see significant action?” Madden asks. In written responses to follow-up questions from Senator Leahy, the company stuck to the familiar, evasive line. The Burmese language community standards promised by Garlick, however, would not launch until September 2015, 14 months after she spoke in Yangon. The company will say that is has more than 7,500 content reviewers working in over 50 languages. He told Congress in written testimony that he is "responsible for" not preventing the social media platform from being used for harm, including fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech. “Facebook wasn’t staffed to deal with a crisis and it sounds like they still aren’t,” the former US tech official says. Related Pages. “There is more we need to do and we will continue to work with civil society groups in Myanmar to listen, learn, and make progress,” she says. Myanmar came up in the hearings too. Zuckerberg later apologized by email for “not being sufficiently clear” about the role that civil society groups play in monitoring content, according to a copy of the email published by the New York Times. ), "From at least that Mandalay incident, Facebook knew. The accusations against him, originally reported on a blog, exploded when they made its way to Facebook—by then, synonymous with the internet in Myanmar. facebook myanmar videos and latest news articles; GlobalNews.ca your source for the latest news on facebook myanmar . But the process lacks scalability and is not efficient, those involved say. 555 likes. Following the pushback from civil society groups, it has taken down pages of other nationalist organizations and monks, removing major sources of hate speech and misinformation. Mizzima, derived from the Pali for middle or moderate and chosen for its inference of an un... See More. Not Now. Myanmar News.Net is a frequented site for those seeking news about Myanmar, which is also known as Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi, the wildly popular opposition leader held by the military under house arrest for some 15 years, was barred from participating. The country’s internet penetration was less than 1 percent in 2011 and there were just 1.3 million mobile subscribers, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations’ agency. Facebook also had at least two direct warnings before the 2014 riots that hate speech was exploding on the platform and could have real-world consequences. Create New Account. Facebook is preparing to launch its Facebook News service in the UK, which works with news media and includes original reporting. A list of languages that the content reviewers do work in was not available, the spokeswoman said. In Myanmar, Facebook essentially is the internet — and, by extension, the only source of information — for some 20 million people, according to BSR’s estimates. At the time, the company had just one Burmese speaker based in Dublin, Ireland, to review Burmese language content flagged as problematic, Callan was told. The fear of web suppression was not unfounded. The social network exploded in Myanmar, allowing fake news and violence to consume a country emerging from military rule. Eleven Media Group - English Edition. facebook myanmar generals videos and latest news articles; GlobalNews.ca your source for the latest news on facebook myanmar generals . The meeting was born in large part out of continued disappointment with the company’s inability to quickly address hate speech. The decision was the right one, he says, because it put a stop to the clashes. Mobile shops appeared seemingly overnight hawking cheap Chinese smartphones. Waves of violence broke out in the western Rakhine state in 2012 between Muslims and Buddhists, leaving nearly 200 dead and displaced some 140,000, mainly Rohingya Muslims and reverberated across the country in the months and years that followed. Still, the company continued its work with seemingly little local input. The stickers were part of the broader “ Panzagar” campaign, “flower speech” in English, launched by activists, including former political prisoners, to counter hate speech and promote online inclusion. The historical record is not encouraging.". All rights reserved. This skepticism about the risks of Facebook was rooted in part in a fear that the government or military would use hate speech as an excuse to censor or block certain websites that it did not agree with. Create New Account. © 2020 Condé Nast. See more. The relationship that Facebook has with the Zaw Htay, a retired Army officer, was described as “problematic,” according to the person with knowledge of the company’s work in Myanmar. The mayhem did not spread, but during the multi-day melee in Mandalay two men—one Muslim and one Buddhist—were killed and around 20 others were injured. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April. The bespectacled, subdued leader surprised observers by embracing a number of reforms—quickly suspending an unpopular Chinese-backed dam project and, in 2012, dropping heavy-handed censorship of the press. Community See All. News. Pyi Myanmar News Journal is the oldest and top Myanmar news journal published weekly since 1996. The arrival of Facebook provided a platform for these rumors to spread at an alarming rate. Garlick, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific region, whose remit included Myanmar, told the audience that in response to the violence the company planned to speed up translation of the sites’ user guidelines and code of conduct into Burmese. He eventually fell asleep. There was also mounting frustration over Facebook’s stubborn resistance to sharing information with the civil society groups they relied so heavily on, like the number of people working on Burmese language content monitoring. His term ended in March 2016. Log In. If the intentions of the police were to deter Aung Naing Soe from reporting, they didn’t work. Myanmar was a small but unique market for the company, and Facebook has taken a multi-faceted approach in recent years to better serve users, Garlick says. In 2013 an official from Human Rights Watch was largely dismissive that Facebook could play a major role in the spread of hate speech. Log In. We welcome your comments, feedback and messages but please respect other Facebook … Madden says he met again with Facebook officials in January 2017 as did two other people familiar with the gathering, which took place in Menlo Park. “I think they were more excited about the connectivity opportunity because so many people were using it, rather than the core issues.” Hate speech seemed like a “low priority” for Facebook at the time, she says. “We have been working over the years to sort of increase our resourcing and the work that we can do to try to reduce misuse and abuse of our platform and to try to drive the benefit that connectivity can have within the country,” she says. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. “Facebook could have done more to proactively talk about positive speech,” he says, “how to look at things on Facebook to avoid pitfalls, and the dangers of negative speech, put their brand behind a more constructive approach to the platform.”. facebook myanmar propaganda videos and latest news articles; GlobalNews.ca your source for the latest news on facebook myanmar propaganda . Yangon, Myanmar +95 9 44900 2083. Sign up for the. News. 1,951,786 people follow this . He pointed to pamphlets distributed by monks and ultra-nationalist organizations in rural areas prior to the 2012 violence in Rakhine as a more pernicious vehicle for spreading disinformation. On the the evening of July 2, 2014 a swelling mob of hundreds of angry residents gathered around the Sun Teashop filling the streets in the commercial hub of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. Hospitals, Tam calls on provinces to impose tougher rules now, Woman behind ‘Zombie Angelina Jolie’ sentenced to 10 years in Iranian prison. Facebook is showing information to help you better understand the purpose of a Page. Related Articles. Under that regime, internet connectivity was severely limited and frustratingly slow. WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. The volume of hate speech required serious product changes. Aung San Suu Kyi, who is barred by the constitution from holding the presidency, serves as the country’s de facto leader with the title of State Counsellor. In an interview, Aung Naing Soe says he was approached by a member of Special Branch, a notorious intelligence unit of the Myanmar Police Force, who questioned him about the false accusation of being a member of ARSA, which, in the time it was on Facebook, was widely shared including by a former member of parliament. At the same time, Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg are under global pressure for mishandling users’ data and the part the company played in influencing elections, particularly in the the United States. He has become an outspoken advocate for media freedom, even joking about his stint in jail. Among officials whose Facebook data is being sought were Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces. Media/News Company. “I named them individually and they all become my friends,” he would say later. It also angered members of the tech community helping flag dangerous content, because they were blamed by upset users for the policy, though they were not involved with the initiative and were unaware that it would start. 976,264 people like this. Many of the posts, he says, compared Muslims to dogs or other animals. Not that the increased government scrutiny deterred Aung Naing Soe from pursuing his work as a journalist. Anti-Rohingya groups saw a 200 percent increase in activity. Barack Obama and Myanmar's President Thein Sein shake hands before the East Asia Summit in Myanmar’s capitol, Naypyitaw, in November 2014. He was arrested in late October 2017 along with two foreign journalists working for Turkey’s state broadcaster for flying a drone near parliament on a reporting trip. 37,924 people like this. See actions taken by the people who manage and post content. 56,049 were here. During the decades of military rule, the country lacked a free press and the junta operated largely in secret—the military changed the country’s flag and moved the capital with almost no prior warnings—people in Myanmar had spent decades reliant on state-run propaganda newspapers, parsing opaque military announcements for what was really happening. or. And even now, nearly four years later, Facebook will not reveal exactly how many Burmese speakers are evaluating content that has been flagged as possibly violating its standards. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook needed to improve came too late for some critics who said he failed to adequately take responsibility for what has been a long-term issue. Copies of it still circulate on the platform. To critics of the social media company, the early response to the Mandalay riots were harbingers of the difficulties it would face in Myanmar in the coming years—difficulties that persist to this day: A slow response time to posts violating Facebook’s standards, a barebones staff without the capacity to handle hate speech or understand Myanmar’s cultural nuances, an over-reliance on a small collection of local civil society groups to alert the company to possibly dangerous posts spreading on the platform. 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