Social media giant Meta is being asked by Amnesty International to pay reparations for its role in the 2017 Rohingya violence which saw thousands of Rohingyas tortured, raped and killed.
A report by Amnesty International alleges that Meta – the parent company of social media platform Facebook- played a direct role in aggravating the violence against the minority Rohingya race in Myanmar.
Amnesty International disputed Meta’s claim that its contribution to the violence was passive, and that it had inadequately handled the crisis, with the organization insisting that Meta’s main business model of targeted and behavioral ads increased the violence and hatred against the community in exchange for profits.
“Meta’s content-shaping algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya,” the report added.
Amnesty claimed that the company’s algorithm pushed hateful and violence inciting contents to the top of people’s news feeds. It claims that Meta had configured its algorithm to promote engaging contents that kept people on its site longer so that more ads could be sold, even if those contents or advertisements preached hate.
In 2018, a group of human rights investigators who worked with the United Nations warned that Meta was amplifying hate against Rohingyas on its platform.
The company has admitted that it was slow in stopping the spread of misinformation, but refuted claims that its content tracking algorithm exacerbated the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya by the Myanmar government.
Meta has faced increasing accusations of pursuing profit over people with claims such as its participation in the Arab Spring and the Cambridge Analytical scandal all put forward as examples.
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