THE NEW YORK TIMES: How much longer are we going to allow its platform to foment hatred and undermine democracy?
For years, Myanmar’s military used Facebook to incite hatred and genocidal violence against the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, leading to mass death and displacement. It took until 2018 for Facebook to admit to and apologize for its failure to act.
Two years later, the platform is, yet again, sowing the seeds for genocidal violence. This time it’s in Ethiopia, where the recent assassination of Hachalu Hundessa, a singer and political activist from the country’s Oromo ethnic group, led to violence in its capital city, Addis Ababa. This bloodshed was, according to Vice News, “supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people’s anger.” This follows a similar incident in 2019, where disinformation shared on Facebook helped catapult violencethat claimed 86 lives in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.
Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow. » | Jamelle Bouie, Opinion columnist | Friday, September 18, 2020
