A fire has destroyed more than 20 shops in a makeshift market near a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh, killing at least three people.

Local police chief Ahmed Sanjur Morshed said they recovered the bodies from the debris after it took firefighters several hours to bring the blaze under control.

The fire broke out early on Friday when residents of the sprawling Kutupalong camp for Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees were asleep.

Sayedul Mustafa, the owner of a shop, confirmed those killed were his staff.

Emdadul Haque, an official with the Fire Service and Civil Defence, said they had to struggle for more than three hours to get the fire under control. He said several others were also injured.

It was not clear how the fire began. It came after another devastating fire last month in the camp left 15 people dead, 560 others hurt and about 45,000 homeless.

Aid agencies and the government said they started rebuilding the shelters after the massive fire last month.

Authorities have sent about 13,000 refugees to an island in recent months, promising a better life for them. The island has been prepared by the government to accommodate 100,000 refugees. Officials said their effort to send more refugees would continue.

Bangladesh has sheltered more than a million Rohingya Muslims, the vast majority having fled Myanmar in 2017 in a major crackdown by that country’s military.

The UN has said the crackdown had a genocidal intent, which is a charge Myanmar rejects.

Bangladesh has hosted the refugees in crowded refugee camps and is eager to begin sending them back to the Buddhist-majority Myanmar, but several attempts failed because the Rohingya refused to go, fearing more violence in a country that denies them basic rights including citizenship.

The repatriation effort was made even more uncertain in February, when Myanmar’s military staged a coup and replaced the elected, civilian government that had been in office since 2016.

Read more: Fire destroys hundreds of homes in Rohingya refugee camp

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.

Read more: First Rohingya refugees arrive at isolated Bangladesh island

Rohingya Muslims drown whilst escaping fighting in Myanmar

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Irish musician and activist Bob Geldof called Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi “a hand maiden to genocide” on Monday as he returned his Freedom of the City of Dublin award in protest over his fellow recipient’s response to the repression of Rohingya Muslims.

“I don’t want to be on a very select roll of wonderful people with a killer,” Geldof told state broadcaster RTE. “Someone who is at best a handmaiden to genocide and an accomplice to murder.”

More than 600,000 Muslims from Myanmar’s Rakhine state have fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after military operations described by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing.

Their plight has drawn outrage around the world. But Suu Kyi, long seen as a champion of human rights, has been criticised for failing to speak out against violence. There have been calls for her to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.

Suu Kyi was given the Freedom of Dublin in 1999 while she was held under house arrest by Myanmar’s then military government. She received her award at a reception in Ireland in 2012, two years after her release.

“Her association with our city shames us all and we should have no truck with it, even by default. We honoured her, now she appals and shames us,” Geldof said in a statement.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Micheal Mac Donncha, said the city council had discussed taking away the honour and the matter was still under review. Last month she was stripped of a similar honour by the British university city of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate.

But Mac Donncha, a councillor for the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, also criticised Geldof’s gesture, saying it was ironic as Geldof held a British knighthood despite “the shameful record of British imperialism across the globe”.

The former Boomtown Rats singer was given an honorary knighted in 1986 in recognition of his charity work, including organising the 1985 Live Aid concert to help those suffering from starvation and disease in Ethiopia.

Other foreign recipients of the Freedom of Dublin include John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Irish rockers U2, who had campaigned for Suu Kyi’s release while she was a political prisoner, also voiced disappointment and said her silence was “starting to look a lot like assent”.

“Who could have predicted that if more than 600,000 people were fleeing from a brutal army for fear of their lives, the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet,” the band said in a statement.

“For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.”

The Myanmar military says it launched the crackdown in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

The bodies of at least 17 Muslim women and children were found on Thursday (August 31) in Teknaf, Bangladesh, as tens of thousands tried to flee the fighting in northern Myanmar.

The victims were believed to have drown after their boat capsized while crossing the border through the Bay of Bengal.

Around 38,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar, United Nations sources said, a week after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army base in Rakhine state, prompting clashes and a military counteroffensive.

The army said it was conducting clearance operations against “extremist terrorists” and security forces had been told to protect civilians. But Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh said it was a campaign of arson and killings aimed to force them out.

On Friday (September 1), Bangladesh border guards found the bodies of another 15 Rohingya Muslims, area commander Lt. Col. Ariful Islam told Reuters. About 20,000 more Rohingya trying to flee are stuck in no man’s land at the border, the U.N. sources said, as aid workers in Bangladesh struggle to alleviate the sufferings of a sudden influx of thousands of hungry and traumatized people.

A prominent Myanmar Muslim lawyer assassinated in Yangon was being closely watched by intelligence agents, according to friends and colleagues, and had received past threats over his sensitive work as an adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling party.

People close to advocate Ko Ni, whose killing has been described by the government as an attempt to destabilise the country, say they warned him to take more precautions for his security, but he had brushed off their concerns.

“I always worried about my boss,” said a staffer in Ko Ni’s office, who spoke to Reuters anonymously because he feared repercussions. “I would follow behind him for security when he was walking home.”

A lone gunman fatally shot Ko Ni in the head on Sunday as he held his young grandson at a taxi stand outside Yangon’s international airport.

The killing of a lawyer known for his work on amending Myanmar’s military-drafted constitution comes amid heightened communal and religious tensions in the Buddhist-majority country, and has raised the spectre of political violence marring a widely lauded transition to democracy after decades of junta rule.

The motives of the gunman – who is in police custody – remain unclear, but he appears to have known Ko Ni’s arrival time at the airport.

Police have said they believe a wider conspiracy led to the shooting, and a second suspect was arrested near the Myanmar-Thailand border on Monday, according to Kan Win, deputy chief of police in the border state of Kayin. The office of the civilian president said initial interrogation of the gunman “indicates the intention to destabilise the state”.

“A TARGETED PERSON”

Constitutional law expert Ko Ni, 63, was instrumental in carving out the position of “state counsellor” for Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) party came to power in April.

The position allows her to effectively lead the government despite being barred from the presidency under the 2008 constitution because some of her family members are foreign nationals.

Ko Ni was working on amendments to the charter, which was drawn up by the generals that ruled the country and guarantees the army a quarter of parliamentary seats and control of security ministries, people who worked with Ko Ni told Reuters.

These colleagues say the veteran lawyer was working on other sensitive topics, too.

Ko Ni wanted to take military officials out of day-to-day administration, and was also spearheading an Interfaith Harmony Bill that would include measures to tackle hate speech, hate crimes and discrimination.

He wanted to amend a 1982 law that restricts citizenship for people not considered members of indigenous ethnicities – such as the 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims in the country’s northwest.

After Buddhist nationalists forced the NLD to cancel a talk at which Ko Ni and another Muslim would be speaking, he said his closeness to Suu Kyi and his work on the constitution were especially sensitive.

“I am a targeted person,” he told campaign group Fortify Rights in August 2015, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.

“I take care of myself and keep a low profile now. I only give training on the constitution and laws, and only indoors.”

When Ko Ni began campaigning for the NLD ahead of a historic election in November 2015, he started receiving warnings he should stop his political work, said Ohn Hlaing, a lawyer at the Laurel Law Firm that Ko Ni founded.

“If he didn’t listen, they would kill him. I didn’t think it would happen,” Ohn Hlaing told Reuters. He was not aware of any specific threats in recent weeks.

“REPORTED TO ABOVE”

After the NLD came to power, safety concerns were coupled with signs of increased surveillance of Ko Ni by intelligence agents, according to three co-workers and two relatives.

Two of Ko Ni’s associates told Reuters they were directly approached by agents to provide information about his activities.

Yin Nwe Khine, Ko Ni’s daughter, said her father said little to his family about threats or surveillance.

“He told us he was being watched by someone, but we didn’t know who,” she said.

Aye Lar, an official with military security affairs in Botataung, the area of Yangon where Ko Ni lived, told Reuters he was charged with watching Ko Ni – which he characterised as routine surveillance of a prominent local figure.

An official at the Ministry of Defence’s press bureau declined to comment.

Official monitoring of the population was widespread during military rule in Myanmar and the domestic intelligence agencies have not been disbanded.

“We had to report to above about Ko Ni’s activities, like his meetings, where he went, and what did he did,” said Aye Lar.

Myo Win, founder of Smile Education, a non-profit foundation, who worked with Ko Ni to promote tolerance between different faiths, said this surveillance followed Ko Ni when he travelled outside of Yangon, citing a trip to the northeastern city of Lashio in October during which intelligence officials visited Ko Ni’s hotel.

But Ko Ni seemed unconcerned about being followed and about his own security, said Myo Win.

“He continued to take Yangon taxis everywhere,” Myo Win said. “The NLD should have some security for their important people”.