Even if humans didn't understand this fact about human nature, the engagement maximizing algorithms absolutely homed in on it. It's also pretty obvious today that the average tech-bro sneering at the humanities a decade back didn't understand this phenomenon or thought it was unimportant.
This short-sightedness from Big Tech is why there is such a societal backlash towards tech today, which is sad because much good has also come out of tech.
I mean, I think the bigger issue is probably how rule of law is totally shattered in Myanmar, and you're not going to get some other government to give you relief when the proper venue is in the jurisdiction where the crimes occurred.
I was living in Bangladesh while this was happening and ended up volunteering at one of the refugee camps. The people there were very aware that the mobs were being organized on Facebook.
Later while working in Bangkok I had a colleague from Myanmar who’s entire family was murdered as they tried to flee across the border to Thailand.
People have been talking about this for years and Facebook absolutely needs to be held accountable along with the pieces of shit running that poor country.
How does some random webshit showing stuff possibly relevant to a user constitute being a radicalization engine? Is this something they could have known at design time? I'm not being rude, I want to know the reasoning.
In this case, Meta was most definitely complicit for other reasons.
- they started operating in a country but had no Myanmar-language human moderation, in a place where FB quickly became synonymous THE internet.
- the AI-powered content moderation failed hard on identifying hate speech partially because everything was written in Zawgyi, not Unicode.
facebook also doesn't have any content moderators in navajo or maya. should they block indigenous people from using their native languages on facebook to avoid harming them?
Interesting question.... but it is a very different case than voluntary starting to operate in a country with voluntary no investment in an ok moderation in the main language spoken there
