Facebook apologises for its role in Sri Lanka’s 2018 anti-Muslim riots

NEW YORK: Facebook Inc has apologised for its role in Sri Lanka’s 2018 anti-Muslim riots after an investigation found that hate speech and rumours spread on the platform may have led to violence against Muslims.

In early 2018,  the riots erupted as anti-Muslim anger was whipped up on social media, forcing the Sri Lankan government to impose a state of emergency and block access to Facebook.

Later, the world’s biggest social media company commissioned an investigation into the part it may have played, and investigators said incendiary content on Facebook may have led to violence against Muslims.

“We deplore the misuse of our platform,” Facebook said in a statement to Bloomberg News after the findings were released Tuesday. “We recognize, and apologize for, the very real human rights impacts that resulted.”

The hate speech and rumours spread on Facebook “may have led to ´offline´ violence”, according to Article One, the human rights consultancy hired to conduct the investigation.

The consultants also suggested that before the unrest, Facebook had failed to take down such content, which “resulted in hate speech and other forms of harassment remaining and even spreading” on the platform.

Article One said one civil society organization had tried to engage with the company on the misuse of Facebook as far back as 2009.

In 2018, officials had said mobs used Facebook to coordinate attacks, and that the platform had “only two resource persons” to review content in Sinhala, the language of Sri Lanka´s ethnic majority whose members were behind the violence.

Facebook has 4.4 million daily active users in Sri Lanka, according to the report by Article One. The firm said Tuesday it had taken a number of steps in the last two years to better protect human rights.

Facebook said in a statement, “In Sri Lanka… we are reducing the distribution of frequently reshared messages, which are often associated with clickbait and misinformation.”