Facebook whistleblower describes how the platform cited violence in Myanmar

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, cited a number of connections between Facebook activity and tragic bloodshed in Myanmar as well as Ethiopia.

On Tuesday during her testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, the whistleblower said, "My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviours we see today are only the beginning. What we saw in Myanmar and now in Ethiopia are the opening chapters of a story so terrifying no one wants to read the end of it," referring to recent bloodshed in both countries.

In 2018, Facebook confessed that it did not do enough to prevent the spread of posts inciting hatred against Myanmar's oppressed Rohingya minority. Following a military coup earlier this year, it has pledged to prevent the dissemination of "misinformation" in the country, according to CNN.

Haugen said Facebook had also done too little to prevent its site from being used by people planning violence.

According to Haugen, engagement-based ranking, which amplifies material that prompts users to respond with likes, shares, or comments, is "literally fanning ethnic violence" in countries like as Myanmar and Ethiopia, which are riven by severe regional and ethnic differences.

"I encourage reform of these platforms, not picking and choosing individual ideas, but instead making the ideas safer, less twitchy, less viral, because that is how we scalably solve these problems," she said.

While Facebook has developed measures to mitigate danger, they are unevenly applied across the world's languages, Haugen said.

"Facebook also knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world. And that's what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia," she said.

Her testimony came a day after Facebook and two of its main services, Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp, suffered an hours-long global outage, and after weeks of mounting pressure on the social media company to explain its policies for young users.