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NY Times, June 15, 2019
When Rohingya Refugees Fled to India, Hate on Facebook Followed
By Vindu Goel and Shaikh Azizur Rahman
KOLKATA, India — Mohammad Salim, a Rohingya Muslim refugee, thought he
had left genocidal violence and Facebook vitriol behind when he fled his
native country, Myanmar, in 2013.
But lately, his new home, India’s West Bengal state, has not felt much
safer. And once again, Facebook is a big part of the problem.
During India’s recent national elections, Mr. Salim said, he saw
Facebook posts that falsely accused Rohingya Muslims of cannibalism go
viral, along with posts that threatened to burn their homes if they did
not leave India. Some Hindu nationalists called the Rohingya terrorists
and shared videos on the social network in which the leader of India’s
governing Bharatiya Janata Party vowed to expel the minority group and
other Muslim “termites.” A week ago, new posts popped up falsely
accusing the Rohingya of killing B.J.P. workers in West Bengal.
“Many groups demonized us on Facebook and WhatsApp, and they succeeded
in whipping up a strong anti-Rohingya passion in the state,” Mr. Salim,
29, said in a recent interview in a village near Kolkata, West Bengal’s
capital.
He said he had quit selling fruit juice at local rail stations and was
moving with his pregnant wife and two toddlers to a new, undisclosed
location — their fourth home in the past 15 months — because he was
afraid of being attacked by right-wing Hindus or arrested.
Mr. Salim’s experience, echoed in interviews with other Rohingya Muslims
who sought refuge in India, shows the widening, real-world repercussions
of Facebook’s failure to stop anti-Rohingya hate speech on its platform,
an issue that the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, promised
last year to solve.
For years, Facebook ignored dehumanizing anti-Rohingya propaganda on its
Myanmar pages, despite substantial evidence that it was leading to mass
killings, rape and the destruction of villages. After United Nations
investigators criticized Facebook last year for playing a “determining
role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the flight of 700,000
refugees, Mr. Zuckerberg told the United States Senate: “What’s
happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more.”
But anti-Rohingya hate speech and falsehoods have since spread to India,
where Facebook has 340 million users. That is creating the potential for
violence in tinderbox regions like West Bengal, a Hindu-majority state
with a substantial Muslim population, where the B.J.P. has stoked fears
of Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. In total, the government
estimates there are about 40,000 Rohingya in India.
“Hate speech and misinformation is adding fuel to the already existing
hatred towards the Rohingyas,” said Mariya Salim, an independent
activist on minority and women’s rights who lives in Kolkata. “It’s not
a secret that online calls for violence can easily turn into real-life
threats.”
Facebook said it had made progress in combating anti-Rohingya hate
speech. The Silicon Valley company has assembled a team of 100 people
who speak Burmese to review posts from Myanmar, which was formerly known
as Burma. It banned some military accounts responsible for hate speech.
And it said it had trained its algorithms to better detect hate speech
globally, claiming that it now removes about two-thirds of such posts
before anyone even complains about them.
“We don’t want our services to be used to spread hate, incite violence
or fuel tension against any ethnic group in any country — including the
Rohingya in India,” Facebook said in a statement. “We have clear rules
against hate speech and credible threats of violence, and we use a
combination of technology and reports to help us identify and remove
such content.”
Yet Facebook is limited in its ability to eradicate hate speech and
false information. It relies heavily on users to report inappropriate
posts and on third-party partners to assess falsehoods, which means only
some of the offending material is caught. The company’s employees and
contractors often lack the linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary
to gauge the offline risks posed by certain content. And Facebook’s
focus on individual posts means it can overlook the long-term impact of
sustained hate campaigns.
“I think Facebook keeps thinking they can solve this within the bunker
of their offices and not with the collaboration of the communities who
are affected,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality
Labs, a human rights group that tracks hate speech in India.
Anti-Rohingya hate speech can also be found on Twitter and YouTube. But
Facebook is far more influential than those services in India.
Ms. Soundararajan said that such speech on Indian Facebook pages started
to increase in early 2018 when the country held elections for the upper
house of Parliament. It escalated late last year as the elections for
the more important lower house of Parliament approached.
Dealing with anti-Rohingya content was made harder by the B.J.P., which
is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hoping to win Hindu votes in
heavily Muslim states like West Bengal, the party campaigned on a
promise to expel Muslim “infiltrators” and to make India — which is
about 80 percent Hindu but constitutionally secular — into a Hindu
nation. B.J.P. supporters used false information and criticism of
Rohingya refugees as shorthand for broader anti-Muslim sentiments, Ms.
Soundararajan said.
She said she had warned Facebook officials last fall about the spike in
anti-Rohingya hate speech and had provided specific examples. But they
did little to address the problem, she said.
Since then, anti-Rohingya posts directed at Indians have circulated
widely on Facebook. In one video, a gang of men from the B.J.P.’s
militant wing brandishes knives and burns the effigy of a child.
“Rohingyas, go back!” the men scream in English and Hindi. This month,
dozens of Rohingya homes were burned in Jammu, where the video and
similar ones were shot.
Facebook said it had decided not to remove the videos because they were
posted by entities claiming to be news organizations and were not
directly linked to violence.
Users also posted gruesome images of human arms and other body parts and
falsely claimed that the Rohingya were cannibals. The images were often
removed because they violated Facebook’s rules against graphic violence
and hate speech, yet they kept resurfacing.
Other videos inaccurately said that Rohingya Muslims had attacked B.J.P.
workers and beaten up a Hindu priest in West Bengal. Facebook said that
after independent fact checkers disproved these claims, it buried those
posts.
In a more subtle attack, two Indian actresses, Payal Rohatgi and Koena
Mitra, championed the anti-Rohingya cause on Facebook and Twitter. Ms.
Mitra accused Rohingya refugees of being terrorists and criminals.
Facebook removed some images posted by Ms. Mitra after The New York
Times inquired about them.
An extremist state lawmaker, Raja Singh, whose official Facebook page
was banned in March over his anti-Muslim hate speech, set up another
page weeks later. In one older video still on Facebook, he called the
Rohingya “insects” and “worms” and said that they should be shot if they
did not leave India voluntarily. The company said Mr. Singh had not
violated its rules since his return.
Facebook said its efforts to fight hate speech were a work in progress.
“We still have a long way to go,” said Rosa Birch, director of the
company’s strategic response team.
Ms. Birch’s year-old team is figuring out how to tackle issues such as
“divisive” posts that do not violate the social network’s rules. It is
also experimenting with new techniques for preventing violence,
including a temporary restriction on the sharing of posts in Sri Lanka
after Muslim-led terrorist bombings there last Easter.
In addition, Facebook said it was supplementing its 15,000 human content
reviewers by teaming up with civil society groups in various countries
to help it assess potentially violent or threatening speech. It declined
to disclose the names of its partners.
Hossain Gazi, a social worker in West Bengal who built huts and rented
homes last year to house several hundred Rohingya refugees, including
Mr. Salim’s family, said that after his efforts received some publicity,
right-wing Hindu groups visited, took photographs and made threats on
Facebook and via phone against the Rohingya living there.
“They even wrote in several social media posts that I was running a
terrorist training camp for the Rohingya and the authorities should
arrest and jail me,” he said. All the Rohingya refugees soon left his
camps, he said.
Abdul Goni, a Rohingya refugee who lived in India from 2012 until
fleeing to Bangladesh last year, said that Rohingya Muslims had used
WhatsApp, where messages are private, to circulate some of the
threatening videos from right-wing Hindu groups and to warn one another
of impending danger.
As for Facebook, which is more public, Mr. Goni said that many Rohingya
had deactivated their accounts on the social network. Others have stayed
on it to monitor what is being said about them but have hidden their
location and erased videos and photos — anything that would link them to
the Rohingya community.
The camp that Mr. Gazi built once housed around 18 Rohingya families in
the village of Harda. They left after being targeted by anti-Muslim
groups.CreditArka Dutta for The New York Times
Mr. Salim, who has since moved from his West Bengal location, said it
was as if he had gone full circle.
“My family fled violence in Burma and took refuge in India,” he said.
“We are being hounded again in this country.”
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