Beyond Bullshit: Facebook, Genocide, and Chaos Fueled by Technology

Since 2017, Myanmar’s military has continued to execute a genocide of Muslim Rohingya people, forcing more than 700,000 people into crowded camps and inciting violence that have killed over 25,000— and Facebook has accepted much of the blame.

By Moor’s definition in “Why We Need Better Ethics For Emerging Technologies,” the spread of Facebook as social media constitutes an enormous subrevolution of the technological revolution in Myanmar. Facebook is firmly in the power stage of its revolution, and millions of people in Myanmar use Facebook as their sole point of contact to any news sources or anything else on the Internet. In late 2018, Facebook released a report that showed how its platform had been used to spread hate speech and lies about the Rohingya people that triggered a genocide, and it's clear to see how these atrocities are the direct result of a (somewhat willful) policy vacuum executed by Facebook. Facebook’s well-established revolution in Myanmar, combined with the very few Burmese-speaking Facebook monitors and little oversight on hate speech, led to an unraveling of misinformation, fake news, fear-mongering, and eventually violent attacks offline against the Rohingya people.

I believe that the nature of Facebook’s policy vacuum and detrimental social impact in Myanmar demonstrate a shortcoming of Moor’s argument on how policy vacuums occur and how better ethics can be instated during a technological revolution. Moor argues that we experience policy vacuums when we cannot anticipate the consequences of new technologies when they are in the early stages of their revolutions, however, Facebook and its potential consequences were well-known in the United States prior to being established in Myanmar. The decision to not hire enough Burmese-speaking Facebook monitors or preventing hate-speech in Myanmar—despite knowing the consequences of doing so in other parts of the world—was a willful decision by Facebook that cost thousands of lives. Unlike what Moor suggests, Facebook’s contribution to the Rohingya genocide was not a failure to identify some ethical problems with hate speech or fake news, but a failure to control Facebook’s power to create such a problem in the first place. It is not enough for technology companies to simply deliberate on potential ethical problems beforehand, but they must have their control consistently checked to prevent them from having the absolute power to enable these crises.