A class action lawsuit filed Monday in California by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, contends that the Company failures in content surveillance and platform design contributed to real-world violence faced by the Rohingya community.
In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a notification letter to Facebook’s London office.
Facebook did not respond to a request to comment on the lawsuit. The company has said it was “too slow to prevent disinformation and hatred” in Burma and that it has taken steps to crack down on abuses of the platform in the region, including ban on the military on Facebook and Instagram after the February 1 coup.
Anupam Chander, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said invoking Burmese law was not “inappropriate.” But he predicted that “it is unlikely to be successful,” saying that “it would be strange for Congress to have excluded the actions under US law, but allowed them to proceed under foreign law.”
More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Burma’s Rakhine State in August 2017 following a military crackdown which included mass murder and rape. Human rights organizations documented killings of civilians and burning of villages.
Burmese authorities say they were fighting an insurgency and deny carrying out systematic atrocities.
In 2018, UN human rights researchers said the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading the hate speech that fueled the violence.
A Reuters investigation from that year, cited in the US complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook.
Source From: Ambito
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