NGO’s Dismiss Mark Zuckerberg’s Apology about Myanmar Calling it “Grossly Insufficient”

Six NGO’s Dismiss Mark Zuckerberg’s Apology about Myanmar and accused Facebook for spreading hate speech in their country. They also said that the way Facebook handled the issue was “grossly insufficient” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for not detecting and preventing spread of fake and abusive content faster, by sending a letter.

Here’s Why NGO’s Dismiss Mark Zuckerberg’s Apology about Myanmar

The Myanmar NGOs released Mark Zuckerberg’s letter just day before he is expected to testify in front of members of two US senate committees regarding privacy, safety and democracy. The letter read as:

“Thank you for writing it and I apologize for not being sufficiently clear about the important role that your organizations play in helping us understand and respond to Myanmar-related issues,” Zuckerberg wrote to the groups. “In making my remarks, my intention was to highlight how we’re building artificial intelligence to help us better identify abusive, hateful or false content even before it is flagged by our community.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder sent this letter due to heavy criticism he had to face after giving an interview few days back. In an interview he admired Facebook and other social platforms for curbing spread of fake news and for stopping inciting ethnic violence in Myanmar.

In response, NGO’s said that only they are responsible for flagging different problematic social media posts and messages which badly affected their country. They also termed Facebook’s approach as “far from systematic”.

Zuckerberg’s Apology about Myanmar is “Grossly Insufficient”

More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar due to UN’s “Ethnic Cleansing”and many are killed too. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar said last month that social media sites, namely Facebook, played a “determining role” in spreading misinformation and hate speech that led to violence.

Following these incidents, Victoire Rio, a social media analyst and spokesperson for the groups said that:

“This is grossly insufficient and only reinforces our belief that Facebook is not doing anywhere near as much as they should and could do to prevent the spread of hatred in Myanmar,”

No doubt, Facebook has banned the stimulus violence and hate speech based on person’s  race or religion,  However it’s automated programs and human moderators do not always detect bad actors. Critics say that all the unrest in Myanmar is due to lack of clarity from Facebook.

Another Facebook spokesperson accepting their disability to fight violence spreading news, said that:

“We should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content. “We are rolling out the ability to report content in Messenger, and have added more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from across all our services.”

Zuckerberg’s letter to the groups followed that:

In addition to improving our technology and tools, we have added dozens more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from users across all our services,” he wrote. “We have also increased the number of people across the company on Myanmar-related issues and we now we [sic] have a special product team working to better understand the specific local challenges and build the right tools to help keep people there safe.”

Critics from six NGO’s want some meaningful solutions from Facebook. NGO’s personals also said that if things go wrong in Myanmar, it can lead to very serious consequence which would be very disastrous.

How Individuals can Save themselves form such fake and violence news on Facebook:

As we know that Facebook is accused of breaching personal data from users, but its also not possible to leave this social media platform as we have made many connections etc. However we can take several precautionary measure which are as follows:

• Clear your profile to Stop apps we connect in the future from accessing the data.
• One should also ignore Facebook’s prompts to add more details to our profile.
• Everything we do on Facebook adds to the profile, Liking, commenting, putting “maybe” on an event invitation, clicking on links. If we want to stop Facebook learning more about us, we need to cut down on activity on the site.
• Get out of the groups we don’t need
• Unfriend the people we don’t absolutely have to be connected to.C
• Stop posting personal pictures and information on Facebook.

Also Read: Take These Precautionary Measures Rather than Deleting Facebook Account