Myanmar activists get Mark Zuckerberg’s attention in fight against Facebook hate speech
Yangon — A whoop of disbelief erupted in the small office used by anti-hate speech activists in Myanmar when they spotted the name that had dropped into their e-mail in-box: Mark Zuckerberg. In a week in which the Facebook CEO has fielded questions in Washington over privacy breaches and election interference, angry online warriors have thrust Myanmar and its volatile social situation into the forefront of the debate on how to fix the platform. They say Facebook is used as a tool to spread incendiary posts, bringing bloodshed to the largely Buddhist country that has expelled about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh since late last year. "It’s not just problematic. It’s dangerous and they need to take more responsibility," said Htaike Htaike Aung, executive director of MIDO, which promotes digital rights. While battling power outages from their front-room office in a Yangon suburb, they penned a letter along with five other Myanmar groups to Zuckerberg questioning his recent asse...
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