Lawyers in the UK and the US filed class action lawsuits against Facebook and its parent company Meta on Monday on behalf of Rohingya displaced persons from Myanmar. In total, the claims for damages in these lawsuits amount to around 150 billion dollars (around 133 billion euros). The lawyers refer to the role that posts on Facebook had in the persecution of the Muslim minority by the military government in the Southeast Asian state dominated by the Buddhist majority.
The Rohingya are the largest stateless minority in the world. The persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar began in 2017. There were massacres, mass rapes and entire villages being pillaged. Between 600,000 and a million people have been displaced, most of them fled to neighboring Bangladesh and others to Thailand. The United Nations describes the actions as ethnic cleansing with “genocidal intent”. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is investigating whether this is a case of genocide. In a ruling last year, he called on the Myanmar government to protect the minority from genocide.
As early as 2018, Facebook was accused by UN investigators of taking too slow and ineffective action against the incitement that had started years before the massacres. In the U.S. lawsuit Product liability and negligence on the part of the platform operator are now cited as grounds of action. The English complaint quotes from an investigation by the Reuters news agency from 2013. It found the following post: “We must fight them as Hitler fought the Jews”. Another entry on Facebook read: “Pour gasoline over them and set a fire so they can meet Allah faster.”
Virtually every Internet user in Myanmar has Facebook, so the hatred spread furiously
A further complication is the dominant role that Facebook owes in countries like Myanmar to the practice of the so-called “zero rating”. From 2010 onwards, Facebook operated the “Free Basics” app in Myanmar, with which one could use the Internet with minimal data costs. The application quotes from an investigation by the non-profit organization Business for Social Responsibility. It said: “Most cell phones sold in the country come pre-installed with Facebook. Myanmar has an equal number of Internet users and Facebook users. As a result, many people use Facebook as their main source of information.”
The US lawsuit also quotes whistleblower Frances Haugen, who gave the record before the US Securities and Exchange Commission: “Facebook executives were aware that posts by the government of Myanmar against the Muslim Rohingya minority were widely spread on Facebook. ” In 2018, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and his co-boss Sheryl Sandberg published a statement in which they admitted that they had done too little against the hate speech.
Both internally and in reporting on Facebook, the persecution of the Rohingya is a model case for the problems the group has in non-English-speaking crisis areas. When the massacres began, Facebook had a single moderator who spoke the local Burmese language and who watched from Dublin. Much more attention is now being paid to the countryside. From the data in the “Facebook Files” into which the Southgerman newspaper Insight shows that Myanmar was classified as a country in the first category of crisis areas for the year. When asked, a company spokeswoman said: “We are appalled by the crimes that are being committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmarhe Burmese Armed Forces, editor’s note. Red.), Disrupted networks manipulating public debate and taking action against harmful misinformation to keep people safe. “
In the motherland of the USA group, many consider the prospects of such a lawsuit to be unpromising. There, the controversial Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 prevents digital corporations from having to take responsibility for content that is created or shared on their platforms. The Bill Clinton administration had passed the law to protect the then fledgling industry from such lawsuits. However, since these companies have been among the most valuable and profitable corporations in human history, the safeguard clause has been considered outdated.
David Mindell, one of the two attorneys who filed the lawsuit, said the Süddeutsche Zeitungthat it is precisely because of this law that it is important to file this lawsuit. “Section 230 was never meant to allow tech firms to support crime.” There is also no comparable law in Burma. In such international cases, US courts would often consult local jurisdiction. “In any case, we don’t think that this law will be a major obstacle.”