Distortion of the Public Sphere

In 2010, in an attempt to explore how technology promotes peace, Facebook launched a new feature ‘Peace on Facebook’: “Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.” Facebook keeps track of for instance how many “friendships” the company has helped create between people representing arch enemies such as Israel/Palestine, Pakistan/India and Ukraine/Russia under the headline “A World of Friends”. All of them great stories. But Facebook speaks less loudly when it comes to the role of the company in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. In 2014, Facebook moved into the country and within three years, the amount of users went from two to thirty million, and since then Buddhist extremists have used the platform to spread misinformation, encouraging violent upheaval. In 2017, propaganda, threats and coordination via Facebook became a contributing factor in this extensive ethnic cleansing. The fact that the conflict seems to have started with an Islamist massacre of Hindu villages in Rakhine state in August 2017, does not exempt Facebook for parts of the blame for the following escalating violence. In August 2018, after the UN had pointed to Myanmar military leaders as responsible for genocide, Facebook finally chose to remove 20 accounts of individuals and organizations from Myanmar’s top political management, among them General Min Aung Hlaing and the military television network Myawady—their Facebook pages were followed by as many as 12 million out of a total population of 53 million and had been used to encourage genocide. It was the first time Facebook banned political leaders from using the platform. The UN report criticized the role of Facebook as a useful instrument of the armed forces who incited the population to fight the Rohingya people. Facebook admitted that they had reacted too slowly.