The United Nations says there is clear evidence that Myanmar’s military secretly orchestrates a hate speech campaign.
Geneva, Switzerland:
A U.N. investigation found on Wednesday that Myanmar’s military posted hate speech against the Rohingya on dozens of seemingly unrelated Facebook pages before launching a massive crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017.
Facebook has long been accused of helping spread widespread hate speech against the Rohingya, who were subsequently driven into neighboring Bangladesh by the hundreds of thousands and are now the subject of a United Nations genocide investigation.
In late 2021, Rohingya refugees sued Facebook for $150 billion, claiming that the social network failed to block hate speech against them.
Now, the United Nations’ Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) says there is clear evidence that Myanmar’s military secretly orchestrates a hate speech campaign.
Investigators said in a new report that the military “disseminated material aimed at instilling fear and hatred in the Rohingya minority” in a “systematic and coordinated” manner.
“It does this by creating a network of secret pages on social media sites, potentially reaching an audience of millions.”
“Internet”
The IIMM was established by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2018 to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and prepare dossiers for criminal prosecutions.
Its new analysis looked at content posted on 43 Facebook pages between July and December 2017.
The report found that seemingly unrelated pages, most of which had no external ties to the military, including some devoted to celebrity news and pop culture, “formed an interconnected network on Facebook — the military network.”
The report noted that there were 10,485 pieces of content containing hate speech on the page, which Facebook removed from its platform in August 2018.
Investigators found hate speech content on six pages that were removed because they were linked to 20 individuals and organizations banned by Facebook for human rights violations. All but one of them are publicly linked to the military.
Investigators also examined 37 other pages that had no external ties to the military and were removed for so-called “inauthentic behavior,” and found hate speech content on 30 of them.
“Excuse and incite violence”
“Hate speech content often exploits widespread discriminatory and derogatory statements about the Rohingya. These include statements that the Rohingya pose an existential threat to Myanmar through violence, terrorism or ‘Islamization,'” the report said.
Some hate speech also “promotes the threat they pose to Myanmar’s racial purity through alleged rampant breeding.”
The pages are linked to each other in a number of ways: they often share creators, administrators, and editors, and regularly post material from the same IP addresses used by Myanmar’s military.
“The same material was often posted on multiple pages on the network, sometimes within minutes,” the IIMM said.
Investigators stressed that the military’s hate speech campaign was ongoing “at the same time that many Rohingya villages were burned and thousands of Rohingya men, women and children were beaten, sexually assaulted and/or killed.”
They noted that “this situation continues as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are forced to flee their homes.
“Instead of taking all measures to prevent violence and protect its people, the Myanmar military has launched a social media campaign to justify and promote violence against the Rohingya minority.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
