Facebook Is Being Sued Over Failing To Prevent Genocide
Facebook is facing a potentially devastating lawsuit!
This article is more than 2 years old
Facebook, or Meta, as it is now called, is being sued over the platform’s alleged role in the genocide of the Rohingya people. The Rohingya are now suing Facebook for over $150 billion. The claims are that Facebook did little or nothing to prevent the inciting of violence on its platform that included hate speech, posts, and groups that were encouraging violence against the Rohingya people in 2017. The algorithm in which Facebook operates was said to be the proponent for these messages of hate to be broadcast everywhere. There is a growing list of complaints in regard to the alleged crimes.
There is a class-action lawsuit that was been filed in San Francisco that claims that Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.” The claim also goes more into detail about Facebook not needing to remain in Burma, and that its presence in the country only further made the situation more for the Rohingya people, allegedly resulting in their genocide.
Part of the complaints made by families of state that they have been through severe acts of violence, murder, and grave human rights abuses, which were allegedly directly related to hate speech delivered through Facebook. This is not a good look for the platform, should any of these claims be proven true in a court of law. Facebook had launched in Myanmar in 2011. The claimant’s reports state that some 10,000 people have been killed as a result of the social media platform allegedly allowing mass amounts of hate speech on its platform.
According to a letter presented by the law firm McCue Jury & Partners, Facebook had allegedly admitted back in 2018 that it did little or nothing to prevent the genocide of the Rohingya people, which are a small minority of Muslims in Myanmar, from receiving mass amounts of incited violence and hate speech. A further independent investigator added to this report by stating that Facebook had actually become the means by which hate groups were able to further their goals in hurting the Rohingya.
The steep allegations that Facebook faces in this claim are: Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people, it failed to investigate moderators and fact-checkers that had been spreading this hate speech through various groups on the platform, and it failed to take down posts or the groups that were heavily involved in the spreading and inciting of violence. Some group’s posts included pictures of the Rohingya people with the caption, “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.”
A Facebook whistleblower by the name of France Haugen, states that the platform, “is fanning ethnic violence in countries including Ethiopia and is not doing enough to stop it.” These are very serious allegations that Facebook is directly related to the genocide of the Rohingya people. There are 20 claimants in the UK currently, and a class-action lawsuit is being built meant to represent the 10,000 Rohingya people living there.
