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    Myanmar - Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg

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    The Guardian
    Representatives of Myanmar civil society organizations wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing concern over Facebook's moderation efforts in Myanmar. They noted that a recent incident where hate speech spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar showed an overreliance on third parties to report issues, a lack of proper emergency escalation procedures, and a reluctance to engage with local stakeholders on systemic solutions. The letter urged Facebook to invest more in moderation, be more proactive in collaborating with local groups, and increase transparency about its processes and interventions.

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    Myanmar - Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg

    Uploaded by

    The Guardian
    32K views2 pages
    Representatives of Myanmar civil society organizations wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing concern over Facebook's moderation efforts in Myanmar. They noted that a recent incident where hate speech spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar showed an overreliance on third parties to report issues, a lack of proper emergency escalation procedures, and a reluctance to engage with local stakeholders on systemic solutions. The letter urged Facebook to invest more in moderation, be more proactive in collaborating with local groups, and increase transparency about its processes and interventions.

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    An open letter to the Facebook CEO from Yangon, Myanmar

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    Myanmar - Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

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    Representatives of Myanmar civil society organizations wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing concern over Facebook's moderation efforts in Myanmar. They noted that a recent incident where hate speech spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar showed an overreliance on third parties to report issues, a lack of proper emergency escalation procedures, and a reluctance to engage with local stakeholders on systemic solutions. The letter urged Facebook to invest more in moderation, be more proactive in collaborating with local groups, and increase transparency about its processes and interventions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    32K views2 pages

    Myanmar - Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg

    Uploaded by

    The Guardian
    Representatives of Myanmar civil society organizations wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing concern over Facebook's moderation efforts in Myanmar. They noted that a recent incident where hate speech spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar showed an overreliance on third parties to report issues, a lack of proper emergency escalation procedures, and a reluctance to engage with local stakeholders on systemic solutions. The letter urged Facebook to invest more in moderation, be more proactive in collaborating with local groups, and increase transparency about its processes and interventions.

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    of 2

    5 April 2018  

    Yangon, Myanmar 
     
     
     
    Dear Mark, 
     
    We listened to your ​Vox interview​ with great interest and were glad to hear of your personal concern and 
    engagement with the situation in Myanmar.  
     
    As representatives of Myanmar civil society organizations and the people who raised the Facebook 
    Messenger threat to your team’s attention, we were surprised to hear you use this case to praise the 
    effectiveness of your ‘systems’ in the context of Myanmar. From where we stand, this case exemplifies the 
    very opposite of effective moderation: it reveals an over-reliance on third parties, a lack of a proper 
    mechanism for emergency escalation, a reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic solutions 
    and a lack of transparency.  
     
    Far from being an isolated incident, this case further epitomizes the kind of issues that have been rife on 
    Facebook in Myanmar for more than four years now and the inadequate response of the Facebook team. It 
    is therefore instructive to examine this Facebook Messenger incident in more detail, particularly given your 
    personal engagement with the case.   
     
    The messages (pictured and translated below) were clear examples of your tools being used to incite real 
    harm. Far from being stopped, they spread in an unprecedented way, reaching country-wide and causing 
    widespread fear and at least three violent incidents in the process. The fact that there was no bloodshed is 
    testament to our community’s resilience and to the wonderful work of peacebuilding and interfaith 
    organisations. This resilience, however, is eroding daily as our community continues to be exposed to 
    virulent hate speech and vicious rumours, which Facebook is still not adequately addressing.  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Over-reliance on third parties 


    In your interview, you refer to your detection ‘systems’. We believe your system, in this case, was us - and 
    we were far from systematic. We identified the messages and escalated them to your team via email on 
    Saturday the 9th September, Myanmar time. By then, the messages had already been circulating widely for 
    three days.  
    The Messenger platform (at least in Myanmar) does not provide a reporting function, which would have 
    enabled concerned individuals to flag the messages to you. Though these dangerous messages were 
    deliberately pushed to large numbers of people - many people who received them say they did not 
    personally know the sender - your team did not seem to have picked up on the pattern. For all of your data, 
    it would seem that it was our personal connection with senior members of your team which led to the issue 
    being dealt with.   
     
    Lack of a proper mechanism for emergency escalation 
    Though we are grateful to hear that the case was brought to your personal attention, Mark, it is hard for us 
    to regard this escalation as successful. It took over four days from when the messages started circulating 
    for the escalation to reach you, with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, being reached in the 
    meantime.   
    This is not quick enough and highlights inherent flaws in your ability to respond to emergencies. Your 
    reporting tools, for one, do not provide options for users to flag content as priority. As far as we know, there 
    are no Burmese speaking Facebook staff to whom Myanmar monitors can directly raise such cases. We 
    were lucky to have a confident english speaker who was connected enough to escalate the issue. This is 
    not a viable or sustainable system, and is one which will inherently be subject to delays.  

     
    Reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic solutions 
    These are not new problems. As well as regular contact and escalations to your team, we have held formal 
    briefings on these challenges during Facebook visits to Myanmar. By and large though, our engagement 
    has been limited to your policy team. We are facing major challenges which would warrant the involvement 
    of your product, engineering and data teams. So far, these direct engagements have not taken place and 
    our offers to input into the development of systemic solutions have gone unanswered.  
    Presumably your data team should be able to trace the original sources of flagged messages and posts and 
    identify repeat offenders, using these insights to inform your moderation and sanctioning. Your engineering 
    team should be able to detect duplicate posts and ensure that identified hate content gets comprehensively 
    removed from your platform. We’ve not seen this materialise yet.  
     
    Lack of transparency  
    Seven months after the case mentioned, we have yet to hear from Facebook on the details of what 
    happened and what measures your team has taken to better respond to such cases in the future. We are 
    also yet to hear back on many of the issues we raised and suggestions we provided in a subsequent 
    briefing in December.   
     
    The risk of Facebook content sparking open violence is arguably nowhere higher right now than in 
    Myanmar. We appreciate that progress is an iterative process and that it will require more than this letter 
    for Facebook to fix these issues.  
    If you are serious about making Facebook better, however, we urge you to invest more into moderation - 
    particularly in countries, such as Myanmar, where Facebook has rapidly come to play a dominant role in 
    how information is accessed and communicated; We urge you to be more intent and proactive in engaging 
    local groups, such as ours, who are invested in finding solutions, and - perhaps most importantly - we urge 
    you to be more transparent about your processes, progress and the performance of your interventions, so 
    as to enable us to work more effectively together. 
     
    We hope this will be the start of a solution-driven conversation and remain committed to working with you 
    and your team towards making Facebook a better and safer place for Myanmar (and other) users.  
     
    With our best regards,  
     
     
     
     

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