Zuckerberg has caused no damage to the stability of any country
He most certainly have!
Facebook and genocide: On the importance of new evidence for Meta’s contributions to violence against Rohingya in Myanmar
Abstract
For the broad public increasingly critical of technology companies, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar
has come to illustrate the evils of Facebook and its parent company, Meta. At the same time, the
Myanmar case has become an influential template for understanding the dangers of social media, past,
present, and future, as well as developing solutions. Yet this template is strikingly narrow: it has been
limited to content that negatively characterizes the victim group, such as through hate speech and
misinformation. As a result, most extant analysis has excluded other processes that scholarship on
genocide has also shown to be significant: practices aimed at constructing not the victims of genocide
but those who are supposed to support it. This paper therefore analyzes some of these practices as
they involved Facebook in Myanmar, offering new interpretations of publicly available evidence and
drawing on observations from work in Myanmar during 2012-15. It then concludes by discussing the
relevance of these initial findings for ongoing efforts to pursue restitution and accountability and
proposes concrete questions that could be taken up in these efforts as well as by scholars and
practitioners.