UN blames Myanmar Army over Facebook pages spreading hate against Rohingya

Prior to its dramatic 2017 crackdown against the predominantly Muslim minority, the Rohingya, dozens of seemingly unconnected Facebook sites were used by Myanmar’s military to spread hate speech, according to a UN investigation conducted on Wednesday.

Before hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced into neighboring Bangladesh during a crackdown that is currently the subject of a UN genocide probe, Facebook has long been accused of aiding in the dissemination of massive volumes of hate speech against the group.

The Rohingya refugees filed a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook in late 2021, claiming the social media platform was unable to stop hate speech against them.

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According to the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) of the United Nations, there is now proof that the hate speech campaign was clandestinely planned by the military in Myanmar.

The investigators stated in a new report that the military had “spread material designed to instill fear and hatred of the Rohingya minority” in a “systematic and coordinated” way.

“It accomplished this by creating a clandestine network of pages on a social media site with the potential to reach an audience of millions.”

The IIMM was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and prepare files for criminal prosecution.

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Its new analysis looked at content posted on 43 Facebook pages between July and December 2017.

That report found that seemingly unrelated pages, most of them with no outward affiliation to the military and including some devoted to celebrity news and popular culture, “formed an interconnected network – the Military Network – on Facebook”.

The report identified 10,485 items with hate speech on the pages, and which Facebook removed from its platform in August 2018.

The investigators had identified hate speech content on six pages that were removed for being connected to 20 individuals and organisations banned by Facebook for human rights violations. All but one of which was overtly associated with the military.

The investigators also examined 37 other pages with no outward affiliation to the military, taken down due to so-called “inauthentic behaviour”, detecting hate speech content on 30 of those pages.

The “hate speech content often played upon prevalent discriminatory and derogatory narratives concerning the Rohinguya, it said. These ranged from the narrative that the Rohingya pose an existential threat to Myanmar through violence, terrorism or ‘Islamisation’”.

Some of the hate speech also played “to the narrative that they pose a threat to Burmese racial purity through their alleged rampant breeding”.

The connections between the pages were seen in various ways: they often shared creators, administrators, and editors, and regularly posted material using the same IP addresses used by the Myanmar military.

“Identical material was often posted on multiple pages in this network, sometimes within minutes,” the IIMM said.

The investigators highlighted that the military’s hate speech campaign “was ongoing at the very time that many Rohingya villages were burned and while thousands of Rohingya men, women and children were beaten, sexually assaulted and/or killed”.

And, they pointed out, it had “continued as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee from their homes.

“Rather than taking all steps to prevent the violence and protect its people, the Myanmar military conducted a social media campaign that excused and promoted violence against the Rohingya minority.”

(With agency inputs)