Amnesty International has recenltly mandated that Facebook should make sure that they full pay all reparations to the hundreds of thousands of the embattled Rohingyas who had been forced from their homes in Myanmar in a campaign which had also been exacerbated by a rampant online hate speech on the social platform.
The Rohingyas which comprises of a mainly Muslim minority had been recently targeted by Myanmar’s military rulers in 2017 and also driven into the neighbouring Bangladesh, where they have since lived in sprawling refugee camps all over the place.
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Victims’ associations and some other rights advocates have also revealed that the violence had been ramped up by Facebook’s algorithms while revealing they play up extremist content that also encourages harmful disinformation and hate speech.
“Many Rohingya tried to report anti-Rohingya content via Facebook’s ‘report’ function” but to no avail, “allowing these hateful narratives to proliferate and reach unprecedented audiences in Myanmar,” Amnesty said in its report.
It noted the revelations from the whistle-blower “Facebook Papers” divulged in October 2021 which had indicated that company executives had known that the site fuelled the spread of the toxic content against ethnic minorities and other groups.
Three legal suits have also been lodged against Facebook by some of the Rohingya representatives, in the United States and Britain as well as with the OECD group of developed economies, under its guidelines for responsible business conduct.
In the United States complaint which had been filed last December in California, the home state of Facebook and its parent company Meta, refugees have been revealed to be seeking $150 billion in damages.
“Meta’s refusal to compensate Rohingya victims to date -– even where the community’s modest requests represent crumbs from the table of the company’s enormous profits -– simply add to the perception that this is a company wholly detached from the reality of its human rights impacts,” Amnesty said.
The NGO urged Facebook to undertake “proactive human rights due diligence” across its platforms, but also called on national authorities to step up their oversight.
“It is imperative that states fulfil their obligation to protect human rights by introducing and enforcing effective legislation to rein in surveillance-based business models across the technology sector,” it said.
Facebook has vowed to revamp its corporate values and operations in response to pressure to clamp down on false information, particularly with regard to politics and elections.