Meta in Myanmar, Part I (an investigation into the role Facebook/Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar) French

cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/8302138

Extrait, introduction : Back in early July, I started working on a quick series of posts about online structures of refuge and exposure. In a draft of what I meant to be the second post in the series, I tried to write a tight two or three paragraphs about the role Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and why it made me dubious about Threads. Over time, those two or three paragraphs turned into a long summary, then a detailed timeline, then an unholy hybrid of blog post and research paper.

What I learned in the process was so starkly awful that I finally set the whole series aside for a while until I could do a lot more reading and write something more substantial. Nearly three months later, I’m ready to share my notes.

Here’s a necessary personal disclosure: I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. Like, I’m on the record swearing about it.

But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed. The harms Meta passively and actively fueled destroyed or ended hundreds of thousands of lives that might have been yours or mine, but for accidents of birth. I say “hundreds of thousands” because “millions” sounds unbelievable, but by the end of my research I came to believe that the actual number is very, very large.

To make sense of it, I had to try to go back, reset my assumptions, and try build up a detailed, factual understanding of what happened in this one tiny slice of the world’s experience with Meta. The risks and harms in Myanmar—and their connection to Meta’s platform—are meticulously documented. And if you’re willing to spend time in the documents, it’s not that hard to piece together what happened.

I started down this path—in this series, on this site, over this whole year—because I want to help make better technologies and systems in service of a better world. And I think the only way to make better things is to thoroughly understand what’s happened so far. Put another way, I want to base decisions on transparently sourced facts and cautiously reasoned analysis, not on assumptions or vibes—mine or anyone else’s.

What I want to promise you, my imaginary reader, is that I’ve approached this with as much care and precision as I can. I cite a lot of documentation from humanitarian organizations and many well-sourced media reports, and also a bunch of internal Meta documentation. What I’m after is maybe something like a cultural-technical incident report. I hope it helps.

This is the first of four posts in the series. Thank you for reading.