Myanmar – Faith Matters

1,800 Rohingya relocated to isolated island

Faith Matters — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 15:37:38 +0000

Seven Bangladesh navy ships carrying 1,804 Rohingya refugees have arrived at an isolated island where they will be relocated despite concerns among human rights groups about their safety.

They reached Bhashan Char island, 21 miles from the mainland, after a four-hour naval journey from the port city of Chittagong, government official Mohammed Khurshed Alam Khan said.

He said authorities at the island received 433 men, 523 women and 848 children.

Authorities insist all were willing to be relocated and no pressure was placed on them.

But several human rights and activist groups say some were forced to go.

It was the second group of Rohingya refugees transferred from crowded, squalid camps in Cox’s Bazar district to the island.

Authorities sent a first group of 1,642 on December 4 despite calls for a halt by human rights groups.

Rear admiral Md Mozammel Haque, commander of the local navy, said the number of refugees willing to join the second phase of relocation “exceeded their expectations”.

He said the authorities were initially expecting to relocate around 1,200 refugees, but 1,804 chose to go.

The island surfaced only 20 years ago and was not previously inhabited.

It was regularly submerged by monsoon rains but now has flood protection embankments, houses, hospitals and mosques built at a cost of more than 112 million dollars (£83 million) by the Bangladesh navy.

The island’s facilities are designed to accommodate 100,000 people, just a fraction of the million Rohingya Muslims who fled waves of violent persecution in their native Myanmar and are currently living in the camps in Cox’s Bazar.

International aid agencies and the United Nations have opposed the relocation since it was first proposed in 2015, expressing fear that a big storm could wash over the island and endanger thousands of lives.

The UN also voiced concern that refugees be allowed to make a “free and informed decision” about whether to relocate.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged the government to cancel the plan.

An influential cabinet minister and general secretary of the governing party, Obaidul Quader, said that the Rohingya are being moved to the island because their repatriation to Myanmar has been delayed.

He said refugees who were earlier taken to Bhashan Char have expressed satisfaction.

About 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to Bangladesh after August 2017, when Myanmar’s military began a harsh crackdown on the minority group following an attack by insurgents.

Security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and burning thousands of homes.

Bangladesh has attempted to start sending refugees back to Myanmar under a bilateral agreement, but no-one was willing to go.

The Rohingya are not recognised as citizens in Myanmar, rendering them stateless, and face other state-sanctioned discrimination.

Rohingya Muslims drown whilst escaping fighting in Myanmar

Memorial to Second World War ‘Forgotten Army’ given listed status to mark VJ Day

Faith Matters — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:16:02 +0000

A Second World War memorial to a force known as the “Forgotten Army” has been given special protection to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day, which effectively marked the end of the conflict.

The Chindit Memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens in central London has been listed at Grade II by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the advice of Historic England.

The Chindit Special Forces fought in Burma (now known as Myanmar) in 1943 and 1944 and, after years of Allied setbacks, helped to turn the tide of the war against Japan in the Far East.

Named after Chinthe, a mythical beast which stands guard outside Burmese temples, the Chindits comprised troops from the UK, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, West Africa and the USA.

They engaged the Japanese behind enemy lines in Burma and were trained to navigate through extremely difficult jungle terrain.

The Chindit Memorial takes the form of an ornate bronze statue of a Chinthe supported on a tall Portland stone plinth.

Major General Orde Charles Wingate, a British Army officer who was born in India to a military family, formed the Chindits.

He was killed on active service in Burma in 1944 and the Chindits were disbanded the following year.

On the front plinth of the memorial is the blue enamel crest of the Chindits Association, as well as a portrait of Maj Gen Wingate and inscriptions explaining the role of the Chindits in the Second World War.

The memorial was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1990 and there is a separate further memorial to the Chindits in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

While fighting in Europe stopped on VE Day, May 8 1945, bitter fighting continued in the Far East until VJ Day, August 15 1945, when Imperial Japan surrendered, days after the USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To mark the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, a military delegation will lay a wreath at the Chindit Memorial.

It is part of a series of commemorations happening across Whitehall, honouring the men who served in the Far East during the Second World War.

Heritage Minister Nigel Huddleston said: “As we come together this weekend to mark 75 years since VJ Day, we must not forget the sacrifices of the Second World War generation.

“It is a fitting tribute to all who served in the Far East that we are protecting and preserving sites so that future generations can learn about this important period of our history.”

Claudia Kenyatta, director of regions at Historic England, said: “We are surrounded by surviving physical evidence of the Second World War, from former air raid shelters to statues and plaques; however memorials that commemorate the Allied forces fighting in the Far East are surprisingly rare in England.

“We are pleased that the memorial to the Chindit Special Forces in Burma has been listed. Seventy-five years on, it’s important that we remember them.”

Two Grade I listed churches in Cambridgeshire have also been re-listed with new information linking them to the Second World War and the Allied victory in Japan.

The church of St Thomas A Becket in Ramsey now includes mention of a Lady Chapel in the south aisle giving thanks for the safe return of Lord de Ramsey, a Second World War prisoner of war in Japan, as well as a dedication and commemorative tablet added in 1956.

The church of St Peter and Paul in Wisbech has been re-listed to make special mention of a memorial to the men from the area who were killed in action or in captivity in the Far East.

U.N.: Social media must clamp down on hate speech

Faith Matters — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:03:23 +0000

Social media, including Facebook, must proactively block content inciting hatred and prevent online campaigns which target minorities, such as those undertaken in Myanmar, the United Nations human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking after U.N. experts accused Myanmar generals of “genocidal intent” and said Facebook had allowed its platform to be used to incite violence against Rohingya.

Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” after reviewing the content.

Zeid, whose spokesman said he has met with major tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook and Google, in recent months, was speaking to a news conference before his four-year term ends on Aug. 31.

Zeid said he didn’t feel Facebook took the issue seriously at first but that the company’s attitude began to change after Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, told a Geneva press conference in March that Facebook was being used in the country to spread hate speech.

“But it shouldn’t be because the press or the human rights community highlights the problem for them then suddenly to respond. They should be aware of it ahead of time,” he said.

“So I don’t think they should wait until the crisis begins. They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” he added.

Facebook said on Monday that while it was too slow to act in the case of Myanmar, it was now making progress, with better technology to identify hate speech and improved reporting tools.

However, Zeid said there was a danger that social media could be over-regulated in a way that breaches human rights law including the right to freedom of expression.

Tech giants should “keep the broadest space available and open to the exercise of freedom of expression”, relying on international human rights law for regulation, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.

Trump’s attack against the Alphabet Inc. unit follows a string of grievances against technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices.

Myanmar: UN says it is still denied ‘effective access’ to Rakhine region

Faith Matters — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 12:36:18 +0000

The United Nations is awaiting “effective access” to the Myanmar region where 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven out in an army crackdown, months after agreeing with the government to aid the return of refugees, the U.N. country head said on Tuesday.

The organisation’s agencies for development and refugees – UNDP and UNHCR – signed a memorandum of understanding with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in June to allow Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh last year to return home.

But requests for authorisations for staff to visit the conflict area have been beset by delays and authorities have offered access to a limited area, Knut Ostby, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, told Reuters.

Ostby said the United Nations had declined to accept an offer from the government to work in a limited number of villages and would not send in experts until it had negotiated a better deal.

“They’re standing ready to go when we have effective access,” he said.

“We need to have the possibility to do a proper job.”

His comments came despite an announcement from Suu Kyi on Tuesday that her government had “granted access” to the United Nations to work in 23 villages across northern Rakhine State as part of a “pilot assessment programme”.

The United Nations wants to implement “quick impact projects” to benefit the population still there, including cash-for-work schemes and small-scale infrastructure projects.

Ostby said he did not know how the 23 villages, spread out across Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, had been selected.

The United Nations wanted to work in villages next to one another, he said, to avoid the risk of creating “inequality among neighbouring villages”.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay said the United Nations could work within the selected areas first and then expand its operations.

“As far as I understand, UNDP is to implement pilot project within the allowed villages and extend afterwards,” Zaw Htay said. “If UNDP does not think it’s enough, they would have to discuss with the government.”

The United Nations as been mostly barred from northern Rakhine State since August last year, when the government accused U.N. agencies of supplying food to Rohingya militants.

The Rohingya, who regard themselves as native to Rakhine state, are widely considered as interlopers by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and are denied citizenship.

The June deal between the United Nations and the government was not made public, but a draft was seen by Reuters and also leaked online last month.

Refugee leaders and human rights groups said the deal failed to give assurances that returning refugees would be granted citizenship and freedom of movement.

Ostby said the United Nations had advocated for the release of the memorandum of understanding.

“We have proposed to the government that it would be a good idea to make it public,” he said. “Having said that, we recognise that such agreements are not normally publicised in other countries.”

Myanmar: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

Faith Matters — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:56:48 +0000

In April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. The situation was dire.

Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”

Four months after Zuckerberg’s pledge to act, here is a sampling of posts from Myanmar that were viewable this month on Facebook:

One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya. That post went up in December 2013.

Another post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication about attacks on police stations by Rohingya militants. “These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water and our ethnic people,” the user wrote. “We need to destroy their race.” That post went up last September, as the violence against the Rohingya peaked.

A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote. The post appeared 11 days after Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony.

The remarks are among more than 1,000 examples Reuters found of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week. Almost all are in the main local language, Burmese. The anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim invective analysed for this article – which was collected by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law – includes material that’s been up on Facebook for as long as six years.

The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated. The material also includes crudely pornographic anti-Muslim images. The company’s rules specifically prohibit attacking ethnic groups with “violent or dehumanising speech” or comparing them to animals. Facebook also has long had a strict policy against pornographic content.

The use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya in the Buddhist-majority country has been widely reported by the U.N. and others. Now, a Reuters investigation gives an inside look at why the company has failed to stop the problem.

For years, Facebook – which reported net income of $15.9 billion (£12.5 billion) in 2017 – devoted scant resources to combat hate speech in Myanmar, a market it dominates and in which there have been regular outbreaks of ethnic violence. In early 2015, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese reviewing problematic posts. Before that, most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.

To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.

Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”

According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee.

Honey Badger employees typically sign one-year renewable contracts and agree not to divulge that the client is Facebook. Reuters interviewed more than a half-dozen former monitors who reviewed Southeast Asian content.

A Facebook official said outsourcing its content monitoring is more efficient because the companies it uses are specialists in ramping up such operations. He declined to disclose how many Burmese speakers the company has on the job worldwide, saying it was “impossible to know, to be definitive on that.”

“It’s not enough,” he added.

For many people in this emerging economy, Facebook is the internet: It’s so dominant, it’s the only site they use online. Yet, the company ignored repeated warnings as far back as 2013 that it faced trouble.

Researchers and human rights activists say they cautioned Facebook for years that its platform was being used in Myanmar to promote racism and hatred of Muslims, in particular the Rohingya.

“They were warned so many times,” said David Madden, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Myanmar. He said he told Facebook officials in 2015 that its platform was being exploited to foment hatred in a talk he gave at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. About a dozen Facebook people attended the meeting in person, including Mia Garlick, now the company’s director of Asia Pacific policy, he said. Others joined via video. “It couldn’t have been presented to them more clearly, and they didn’t take the necessary steps,” Madden said.

In a statement, Garlick told Reuters: “We were too slow to respond to the concerns raised by civil society, academics and other groups in Myanmar. We don’t want Facebook to be used to spread hatred and incite violence. This is true around the world, but it is especially true in Myanmar where our services can be used to amplify hate or exacerbate harm against the Rohingya.”

She added that Facebook is focussed on addressing challenges that are unique to Myanmar “through a combination of people, technology, policies and programs.” The company also said it has banned several “hate figures and organizations” on Facebook in Myanmar.

Facebook’s struggles in Myanmar are among much broader problems it faces. Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony in April primarily focussed on the company’s mishandling of user data, whether it censors conservative views and Russia’s exploitation of Facebook to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Of all of Facebook’s travails, though, Myanmar may be the bloodiest. The Myanmar military stands accused by the U.N. of having conducted a brutal campaign of killings, mass rape, arson and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. The government denies the allegations.

The social media giant doesn’t make public its data on hate speech in Myanmar. It says it has 2.2 billion global users and each week receives millions of user reports from around the world about problematic content.

In compiling examples of hate speech for this article, Reuters found some that Facebook subsequently removed. But the vast majority remained online as of early August.

After Reuters alerted Facebook to some of the derogatory posts included in this story, the company said it removed them. “All of it violated our policies,” it said.

Reuters itself sometimes flags to Facebook threats posted on the platform against its reporters. These include the Burmese journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who are on trial in Myanmar on charges of violating a state secrets law. The two were arrested in December while reporting on the massacre of 10 Rohingya men and have received a deluge of death threats on social media over their story. Facebook has removed such content several times at the news agency’s request.

‘SENDING FLOWERS’

Myanmar emerged from decades of military rule in 2011, but religious violence has marred its transition to democracy. In 2012, clashes in Rakhine State between ethnic Rakhine, who are Buddhists, and the Rohingya killed scores of people and left 140,000 displaced – mostly Muslims.

Facebook’s extraordinary dominance in Myanmar began taking root around the same time. But not by design.

As recently as six years ago, Myanmar was one of the least connected countries on earth. In 2012, only 1.1 percent of the population used the internet and few people had telephones, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. The junta that had ruled the country for decades kept citizens isolated.

That all changed in 2013, when a quasi-civilian government oversaw the deregulation of telecommunications. The state-owned phone company suddenly faced competition from two foreign mobile-phone entrants from Norway and Qatar.

The price of SIM cards dropped from more than $200 to as little as $2 and people purchased them in droves. By 2016, nearly half the population had mobile phone subscriptions, according to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry’s trade association. Most purchased smartphones with internet access.

One app went viral: Facebook. Many saw it as an all-in-one solution – offering a messaging system, news, and videos and other entertainment. It also became a status symbol, said Chris Tun, a former Deloitte consultant who advised the government. “If you don’t use Facebook, you’re behind,” he said. “Even grandmas, everyone was on Facebook.”

To capture customers, Myanmar’s mobile phone operators began offering a sweet deal: use Facebook without paying any data charges.

“Facebook should be sending flowers to me, because we have been an accelerator for bringing the penetration,” said Lars Erik Tellmann, who until July was chief executive of Telenor Myanmar, part of Norway’s Telenor Group. “This was an initiative we took fully on our own. And this was extremely popular.”

In Myanmar today, the government itself uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the president in March.

‘GENOCIDE ALL OF THE MUSLIMS’

In the fall of 2013, Aela Callan, an Australian documentary filmmaker studying at Stanford University, began a project on hate speech and false reports that had spread online during conflicts between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims the prior year. In June 2012, at least 80 people had died in riots and thousands of Rohingya were moved into squalid internment camps. Anti-Rohingya diatribes appeared on Facebook. One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.”

In November 2013, she met at Facebook’s California headquarters with Elliott Schrage, Vice President of Communications and Public Policy. “I was trying to alert him to the problems,” she said.

Emails between the two show that Schrage put Callan in touch with internet.org, a Facebook initiative to bring the internet to developing countries, and with two Facebook officials, including one who worked with civil-society organizations to assist the company in coping with hate speech.

“He didn’t connect me to anyone inside Facebook who could deal with the actual problem,” she said.

Asked for comment, Schrage referred Reuters to a press person at Facebook. The company didn’t comment on the meeting.

Matt Schissler, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, said that between March and December 2014, he held discussions with Facebook officials in a series of calls and online communications. He told them how the platform was being used to spread hate speech and false rumours in Myanmar, he said, including via fake accounts. He and other activists provided the company with specific examples, including a Facebook page in Burmese that was called, “We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs.” The page was removed.

Schissler belonged to a private Facebook group that was set up so that Myanmar human rights activists, researchers and company employees such as Asia Pacific policy chief Garlick could discuss how to cope with hate speech and other issues. The activists brought up numerous problems with Facebook’s multi-step reporting system for problematic content. As one example, they cited a photograph of an aid worker in Rakhine State in a post that called him “a traitor to the nation.” It had been shared 229 times, according to messages reviewed by Reuters.

One of the private group’s members had reported it to Facebook as harassment of an individual but later received a message back: “We reviewed the photo you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.” After multiple complaints by activists over six weeks, a Facebook employee finally explained to the activists that the takedown request was rejected because the photo had been reported, but not the comment above it. It eventually was taken down.

In March 2015, Schissler gave a talk at Facebook’s California headquarters about new media, particularly Facebook, and anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar. More than a dozen Facebook employees attended, he said.

Two months later, Madden, the tech entrepreneur, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters about tensions and violence between Buddhists and Muslims. He said he showed a doctored picture that had spread on Facebook of the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is Buddhist, wearing a Muslim head scarf. The image, Madden said, was meant to imply she was sympathetic to Muslims – a “very negative message” in Myanmar.

“The whole point of this presentation was really just to sound the alarm, to show very vividly the context in which Facebook was operating, and already the evidence of how it was being misused,” he said. He left the meeting thinking his audience took the talk seriously and would take action.

Madden had founded a technology hub and start-up accelerator in Yangon called Phandeeyar. He said he and others involved with the venture interacted with Facebook “many dozens” of times over the next several years, including via email, in the private Facebook group and in person, showing how the network’s systems for detecting and removing dangerous content were ineffective. He isn’t sure what steps the company took in response. “The central problem is that the mechanisms that they have to pull down hate speech in a timely way, before it does real world harm, they don’t work,” he said.

Madden and Jes Kaliebe Petersen, Phandeeyar’s chief executive, said Facebook was still relying too much on their group and other volunteers to report dangerous posts. “It shouldn’t be incumbent on an organisation like ours or people who happen to be well-connected with folks inside Facebook to report these things,” Petersen said.

In April, shortly before Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony, Phandeeyar and five other Myanmar groups blasted him for claiming in an interview with Vox that Facebook’s systems had detected and removed incendiary messages in September last year. “We believe your system, in this case, was us,” they wrote. Zuckerberg apologised.

Back in 2014, tech organizations and researchers weren’t the only ones sounding alarms with Facebook. So was the Myanmar government.

In July of that year, riots broke out in the central city of Mandalay after false rumours spread online, on Facebook and elsewhere, that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist woman. A Buddhist man and a Muslim man were killed in the fighting.

The Myanmar government asked Tun, then a Deloitte consultant, to contact the company. He said he didn’t succeed at first, and the government briefly blocked Facebook.

Tun said he eventually helped to arrange meetings between the government and Facebook. “What they promised to do was, when you spot fake news, you could contact them via email,” Tun said of Facebook. “And they would take action – they were willing to take down pages after their own verification process.”

The government began reporting cases to Facebook, but Tun said he quickly realized the company couldn’t deal with Burmese text. “Honestly, Facebook had no clue about Burmese content. They were totally unprepared,” he said. “We had to translate it into English for them.”

‘I DON’T KNOW THE LANGUAGE’

In August 2013, Zuckerberg announced a plan to make the Internet available for the first time to billions of people in developing countries.

“Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” he said. The company would now work, he added, to make “internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”

But in Myanmar, the language barrier would cause trouble. Most people here don’t speak English. Although Myanmar users at the time could post on Facebook in Burmese, the platform’s interface – including its system for reporting problematic posts – was in English.

Making matters worse, the company’s operation for monitoring content in Burmese was meagre.

In 2014, the social media behemoth had just one content reviewer who spoke Burmese: a local contractor in Dublin, according to messages sent by Facebook employees in the private Facebook chat group. A second Burmese speaker began working in early 2015, the messages show.

In Manila – the original site of the outsourced Project Honey Badger – there were no content reviewers who spoke Burmese. People who reviewed Myanmar content there spoke English.

“In cases like hate speech where we didn’t understand the language, we would say, ‘I don’t know the language,'” said a person who worked there. “So the client had to solve that,” the person said, referring to Facebook.

By 2015, Facebook had around four Burmese speakers reviewing Myanmar content in Manila and Dublin. They were stretched thin: that year Facebook had 7.3 million active users in Myanmar.

Accenture slowly began to hire more Burmese speakers. With the help of volunteer translators, Facebook also introduced a Burmese-language interface.

By 2016, the Honey Badger project had moved to Kuala Lumpur after Accenture convinced Facebook it would be easier to recruit Burmese and others to work in Malaysia’s capital than in further-off Manila, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In an office tower in Kuala Lumpur, teams of content monitors are assigned to handle different Asian countries, not just Myanmar. They are paid around $850 to $1000 a month and are often employed by temporary staffing agencies, according to ex-employees and online recruitment ads.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve chosen to work only with highly reputable, global partners that take care of their employees, pay them well and provide robust benefits – this includes Accenture in Asia Pacific.”

A spokesperson for Accenture confirmed it partners with Facebook. “The characterization of our operations as ‘secretive’ is misleading and confidentiality is in place primarily to protect the privacy and security of our people and the clients we serve,” the spokesperson said.

THE COMMUNICATIONS MAN

Former content monitors said they often each had to make judgements on 1,000 or more potentially problematic content items a day, although the number is now understood to be less.

Facebook’s complete rules about what is and isn’t allowed on its platform are spelled out in its internal community standards enforcement guidelines, which the company made public for the first time in April. It defines hate speech as “violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation” against people based on their race, ethnicity, religious affiliation and other characteristics.

In response, Facebook said: “Content reviewers aren’t required to evaluate any set number of posts … We encourage reviewers to take the time they need.”

A Facebook official also told Reuters the community standards policy is global, “but there are local nuances,” such as slurs, that content reviewers who are native speakers can consider when making decisions. But former content monitors told Reuters the rules were inconsistent; sometimes they could make exceptions and sometimes they couldn’t.

Former content monitors also said they were trained to err on the side of keeping content on Facebook. “Most of the time, you try to give the user the benefit of the doubt,” said one former Facebook employee.

The ex-monitors said they sometimes had as little as a few seconds to decide if a post constituted hate speech or violated Facebook’s community standards in some other way. They said they didn’t actually search for hate speech themselves; instead, they reviewed a giant queue of posts mostly reported by Facebook users.

Many of the millions of items flagged globally each week – including violent diatribes and lurid sexual imagery – are detected by automated systems, Facebook says. But a company official acknowledged to Reuters that its systems have difficulty interpreting Burmese script because of the way the fonts are often rendered on computer screens, making it difficult to identify racial slurs and other hate speech.

Facebook’s troubles are evident in a new feature that allows users to translate Burmese content into English. Consider a post Reuters found from August of last year.

In Burmese, the post says: “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive.”

Facebook’s translation into English: “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar.”

In response, Facebook said: “Our translations team is actively working on new ways to ensure that translations are accurate.” The company said it uses a different system to detect hate speech.

Guy Rosen, vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post on Facebook in May about the problems the company faced in identifying hate speech. “Our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams,” he wrote.

Facebook officials say they have no immediate plans to hire any employees in Myanmar itself. But the company does contract with local agencies for tasks unrelated to content monitoring. One is Echo Myanmar, a communications firm whose managing director is Anthony Larmon, an American.

Larmon has expressed strong opinions on the Rohingya. Toward the end of 2016, the Myanmar army launched an onslaught across some 10 villages after Rohingya militants attacked border posts. At the time, a U.N. official accused the government of seeking “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya.

In November 2016, Larmon wrote that an article about the U.N. allegation was “misleading.” He cited what he said were claims by multiple “local journalists” that the ethnic minority “purposely exaggerate (lie about)” their situation to “get more foreign aid and attention.”

He also wrote: “No, they aren’t facing ethnic cleansing or anything remotely close to what that incendiary term suggests.” He said he later removed the post.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Larmon’s post “does not represent Facebook’s view.”

Larmon told Reuters: “It was overly-emotional, under-informed commentary on a highly nuanced subject that I do regret. My view on the Rohingya, same today as then, is that they should be safely repatriated and protected.”

The platform on which he aired his views about the Rohingya? Facebook.

Myanmar: ‘Hijab is like a key’ – beauty blogger battles bias

Faith Matters — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 10:21:41 +0000

Muslims in Buddhist-majority Myanmar usually keep a low profile for fear of intimidation, but Win Lae Phyu Sin, one of the community’s rare bloggers on beauty care, has gone the other way.

The 19-year-old was the centre of attraction at a recent launch of beauty products in Yangon, her striking multi-coloured make-up offset by a long-sleeved green-and-white gown and matching hijab, a headscarf worn by some Muslim women.

“I don’t regret my decision to wear the hijab,” the blogger said. “Our God opens many ways for me. Hijab is like a key for me. I can use it to go where I want to go, and do what I want.”

Muslims, who make up about 5 per cent of the nation of around 50 million, say they have not been able to open new mosques in decades and struggle to rent apartments from Buddhist landlords.

Systematic persecution of Muslims is growing in Myanmar, rights groups say, though world attention has focussed on its stateless Rohingya Muslims, with the United Nations and aid groups saying more than 700,000 were driven into neighbouring Bangladesh after an army crackdown last year.

But many Muslims of all ethnicities had been refused national identity documents, and denied access to some places of worship, Burma Human Rights Network said in a report last year.

For some of Win Lae Phyu Sin’s students, her tutorials are not merely about applying eyeshadow and highlighter, but also about building confidence and pride in an identity constantly questioned by Buddhist fellow citizens.

“I saw her applying make-up while wearing the hijab and it’s amazingly beautiful,” said Hay Mann Aung, 20.

“I wanted to be as beautiful as her.”

Win Lae Phyu Sin’s effort to impart a cool, chic vibe to the image of Myanmar Muslims, deploying stylish clothes that match her hijabs, elaborate mascara, and eyeshadow layered in bold colours, has drawn admirers.

She has 6,000 followers on social media site Facebook and 600 students have attended more than 150 classes on the use of cosmetics run in a makeshift studio.

CRITICISM

But her high profile has drawn criticism and even discrimination: a Buddhist woman who enrolled in her class backed out on discovering Win Lae Phyu Sin was Muslim.

Some Facebook commenters have attacked her for being too flamboyant and using make-up, which conservative Muslims regard as taboo, but the blogger refuses to let critics waste her time.

“When people attack or criticise me outside and online, I choose to ignore them,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do.”

Her growing fame, fed by dozens of online make-up tutorials and events at shopping malls, has prompted trips to Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, and she plans to visit Kuala Lumpur, the capital of neighbouring Malaysia.

Win Lae Phyu Sin started with tutorials on make-up filmed in a bedroom shared with her sister, posting them on Facebook before offering classes.

“After I graduated from high school, my boyfriend gave me make-up palettes as a present,” she said. “I didn’t know how to use them so I Googled it and learned.”

But acquiring professional expertise proved too expensive, so Win Lae Phyu Sin came up with the idea of six-hour sessions, aimed at regular “girls like me”, that cost less than $25.

A year on, she brings to every lesson two bags packed with eyeliners, brushes and small mirrors for every student. At one recent session, she discussed skin types before handing out bottles of foundation and eyeshadow for students to try.

Win Lae Phyu Sin is undeterred by those who denigrate her for being a Muslim and wearing a hijab that exposes the face.

“‘Don’t you know you will go to hell if you do that? Why don’t you take off the hijab during shooting?'” she quoted some Facebook critics as asking.

But she added, “I will keep on doing this, because this is my passion.”

Buddhist mobs target Sri Lanka’s Muslims despite state of emergency

Faith Matters — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 11:54:22 +0000

Sri Lanka shut down social messaging networks including Facebook on Wednesday to control violence targeted at the country’s minority Muslims, officials said, even after the imposition of emergency in the Buddhist-majority island.

Tension has been growing between the two communities in Sri Lanka over the past year, with some hardline Buddhist groups accusing Muslims of forcing people to convert to Islam and vandalising Buddhist archaeological sites.

Some Buddhist nationalists have also protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim Rohingya asylum seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalism has also been on the rise.

Police clamped an indefinite curfew in the central highlands district of Kandy where the violence has been centred since Sunday following the death of a Buddhist youth in an altercation with a group of Muslims.

Buddhist mobs attacked mosques and businesses belonging to Muslims overnight, residents told Reuters on Wednesday, even after President Maithripala Sirisena imposed emergency for seven days to control the violence.

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said there had been “several incidents” throughout Tuesday night in the Kandy area, famous for its tea plantations.

“The police arrested seven people. Three police officers were injured from the incidents,” Gunasekara told Reuters. There was no information about how many civilians had been wounded, he said.

Some of the violence has been instigated over social media with postings appearing on Facebook threatening more attacks against Muslims, the government said.

On Wednesday, it said Facebook, Viber and Whatsapp would be blocked across the country for three days.

Sri Lanka is still healing from a 26-year civil war against Tamil separatists that ended in 2009, with reports of rights abuses on both sides. Muslims make up 9 percent of the 21 million population, the smallest minority after ethnic Tamils, most of whom are Hindus.

UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said he was alarmed by the recurring episodes of violence against ethnic and religious minorities in Sri Lanka and sought accountability.

“There should be no impunity, either for the incitement that led to the attacks, or the attacks themselves,” he said in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The U.S. State Department in a security alert warned of the possibility of further unrest in Kandy, famous for a temple said to contain the tooth of Buddha.

A government minister said the violence in Kandy had been whipped up by people from outside the area. “There is an organised conspiracy behind these incidents,” Sarath Amunugama, a senior minister, told reporters in Colombo.