The social media company said on Thursday that it was “treating the situation in Myanmar as an emergency”, adding that it would “significantly distribute all content” on pages and profiles cited by the military, called the Tatmadaw reduced ‘, which continued to spread misinformation. ‘
This means that people use Facebook (FB) will see significantly less content from the pages in their news feed. Facebook has tens of millions of users in Myanmar.
The company also suspended ‘Myanmar’s government agencies’ indefinitely’ from using special channels reserved for officials to send requests to Facebook to remove content, according to a blog post by Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s director of policy for emerging economies in the US. Pacific Asia. region.
He said the company “protects content, including political speech, that allows the people of Myanmar to express themselves and show the world what is happening in their country.”
The accounts restricting Facebook include the Tatmadaw Information Team’s page, as well as one managed by Tatmadaw spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun, according to the blog post.
Frankel added that Facebook would no longer recommend the military pages to people, who are less likely to refer people to those pages.
The Facebook announcement comes just over a week after Myanmar’s army took power during a coup, which detained the country’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and numerous other top governments.
After the coup, internet and news services nationwide were disrupted, limiting the ability of people to obtain information about the events. Facebook told CNN last week that its services were “disrupted for some people”. The country later expanded the block to Instagram which is also owned by Facebook Twitter (TWTR).
The company said Friday the blocking order is still in place. (However, this does not prevent people from accessing Facebook services by using virtual private networks or VPNs, which use encryption to disguise Internet traffic.)
Facebook is ubiquitous in Myanmar, and for many people it is one of the most important ways they have access to the internet.
Marzuki Darusman, chair of a United Nations human rights inquiry in Myanmar, once said that ‘social media is Facebook and Facebook is social media’ in the country.
It has also led to many investigations into how Facebook operates in the market, and it has admitted in the past that it has not done enough to prevent the platform from being used to incite political divisions and bloodshed there.
Frankel, the Facebook policy director, said in his blog post that the company’s efforts to protect the citizens of Myanmar “build on our work since 2018 to keep people safe and reduce the risk of political violence in Myanmar.”
In addition to removing false information, he said the company also helps people who are “reasonably” afraid of detention to secure their Facebook accounts, among others.
Rishi Iyengar, James Griffiths and Helen Regan contributed to this report.
.Source
Related
