Facebook myanmar language
In the third quarter of 2019, Facebook removed 7 million pieces of hate speech content from its global platform, with 80 percent caught proactively using artificial intelligence.
Today, Facebook’s content moderation is increasingly done through automated flagging and removal. Since that time, Facebook has also removed hundreds of pages that violate their community standards, and banned the Myanmar military’s commander-in-chief from the site.
The company has since invested heavily in its Myanmar-focused operations, and now has more than 100 Myanmar-speaking content reviewers and the ability to review content in some of the country’s ethnic languages, including Jinghpaw. “The government has recently taken on the mobile internet at large, with one still-expanding shutdown, with one still-expanding shutdown in place since June 2019 in a conflict-torn area on the opposite side of the country from Kachin.įacebook gained widespread attention in relation to Myanmar following mass violence against Rohingya Muslims in late 2017. Online defamation is still criminalized and the law is often used by government officials and the military to silence dissent. Institutionalized monitoring and censorship were the norm in Myanmar under the military regime, which transitioned to a more democratic rule in 2011. Experts estimate that there are roughly 1.1 million mother-tongue Jinghpaw speakers - a tiny sliver in a nation of over 50 million - and crackdowns on speech have sometimes been a prelude to more troubling measures. That history of marginalization and civil war has left many Kachin wary of even the smallest hints of surveillance. In the third quarter of 2019, Facebook removed 7 million pieces of hate speech content
In the past two years, five Kachin activists were jailed in cases related to freedom of expression, and in September, the Myanmar military threatened charges, later dropped, against an influential Kachin Baptist reverend after he told President Trump that Christians in Myanmar were being “oppressed and tortured by the Myanmar military government.” The Myanmar government does not officially recognize the Kachin national flag or allow it to be raised at state-sponsored events, replacing it with their own version. “I would like to see more transparency regarding Facebook’s social media monitoring process in Myanmar.”įor the Kachin, a predominantly Christian minority living in the northernmost state of the Buddhist-majority country, feelings of oppression are strong. “For the Kachin, there are forces looking to monitor any expressions of resistance against the state’s narratives,” said Kachin resident Ja Htoi Pan. That realization has evoked a visceral reaction from the Kachin, and brought forth new calls for the company to be more transparent about its technology and the ways it will be used.
“For the Kachin, there are forces looking to monitor any expressions of resistance”īut while the disabling of Jinghpaw was not an active move of censorship, it alerted many Kachin people that Facebook had the capability to identify their language, an alarming thought for the embattled minority group.