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(Adds an HRW quote)
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 (Reuters) – Facebook Inc. announced Monday that a report on human rights commissioned on its presence in Myanmar showed that it had not done enough to prevent his social network from being used to incite violence.
The report from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, recommends Facebook to more strictly enforce its content policies, to strengthen its engagement with Myanmar officials and groups of people. civil society and to regularly publish additional information on its progress in the country.
"The report concludes that before this year, we were not doing enough to prevent our platform from being used to encourage division and incite violence offline." We agree that we can and must to do more, "said Alex Warofka, a product of Facebook's policy manager, said in a blog post.
BSR also warned that Facebook was to be ready to deal with a wave of misinformation in the Myanmar 2020 elections and new problems related to the increasing use of its WhatsApp in Myanmar, according to the report released by Facebook.
A Reuters special report https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate in August revealed that Facebook had failed to consider many warnings from organizations in Myanmar that social media would fuel attacks on minority groups such as Rohingya.
In August 2017, the army carried out a crackdown in the state of Myanmar Rakhine in response to Rohingya insurgency attacks, pushing more than 700,000 Muslims to neighboring Bangladesh, according to UN agencies.
In August, the social media website removed several Myanmar military officials from the platform to prevent the spread of "hatred and misinformation", forbidding for the first time the prohibition of military and political leaders of a country.
He also removed dozens of accounts for participating in a campaign that "used seemingly unrelated information and opinion pages to secretly broadcast Myanmar's military messages."
The decision came hours after UN investigators said that the army had carried out mass killings and mass rapes against Rohingya Muslims for genocidal purposes.
Facebook said that it had begun to correct the shortcomings.
Facebook said 99 language specialists in Myanmar had now examined potentially dubious content. In addition, he has extended the use of automated tools to reduce the distribution of violent and dehumanizing positions during their examination.
In the third quarter, the company said it "acted" on about 64,000 content violating its policies on hate speech. About 63% of them were identified using automated software, compared to 52% in the previous quarter.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Asia said the report showed that Facebook was working hard to solve the problems and should step up its efforts, particularly to combat hate speech before the general elections of 2020.
"It is often said that in Myanmar, Facebook is truly Internet, because of its widespread use among online users – that is why Facebook must act accordingly to ward off what is likely to be a speech tsunami." hate and attacks around the world.Elections 2020, "said Phil Roberston, deputy director of HRW.
According to BSR, Facebook has about 20 million users in Myanmar, warning that Facebook is facing several unresolved challenges in Myanmar.
BSR said locating local staff, for example, could help Facebook better understand how its services are used locally, but that its workers could be targeted by the country's armed forces, accused by the United Kingdom of ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. (Report by Paresh Dave and Antoni Slodkowski, edited by Peter Henderson and Michael Perry)
