Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.
In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.
Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.
You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.
> Even before internet access became widely available in Myanmar, Facebook was already the dominant platform in the country.
> In 2011, despite widespread restrictions on internet access, it was estimated that approximately 80% of Myanmar's few internet users had Facebook accounts.
> By 2014, Facebook was estimated to have had hundreds of thousands of users in Myanmar, many of whom were accessing the platform through internet cafes or devices belonging to their friends or family members.
> Prior to 2015, Facebook was only available in Myanmar via an English-language interface, but a specific Myanmar version was launched in 2015.
And so, the standards of moderation will be increasingly more inconsistent and chaotic as cultural distances between the company HQ in US to the poster of a particular content increases - I see people complaining about food pics getting flagged as pornography in Japanese all the time.
I can't imagine how random the moderation infra will respond to: anti-Muslim propaganda briefs created by violent fundamentalist Buddhism terrorism groups circulated in the minority inhabited contested forested border areas of Myanmar. That description alone sounds Neuromancer enough to that the system might just fail open, before it digests the content and likewise fail open.
> Relishing his extremist reputation, Wirathu describes himself as the "Burmese bin Laden."
Wirathu is clearly a sociopath -- and the furthest thing from a real Buddhist. If only people weren't so easily led by those who use religion as a means of control....
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...