When Facebook Spills Blood

“There is no debate about whether social media might fuel genocidal violence. It already has. The question is how best to meet our moral responsibility.”

A common response to concerns about our digital darkness—Russian astroturf campaigns, psychographic targeting, and “fake news”—is that social media is just a noise machine with limited impact. But a massacre in Burma shows that the opposite is true. If we are going to combat extremist violence, we need to acknowledge that a new front has opened in the information war.

Last summer, Burmese government troops and militia members swarmed into Rohingya villages on the country’s western coast. Aid giant Doctors Without Borders reported that several thousand ethnic Muslims were murdered, including over 700 infants and young children. More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled their homes and become refugees since the attacks. New reporting shows that this violence was fueled by poorly monitored Facebook posts.

Facebook should have known better. In fact, in 2014, Facebook performed extensive testing to prove that what its users see and read influences how they think and feel. The social network famously worked with researchers to manipulate over half a million of its users’ news feeds, later tracking how the tone of their unwitting subjects’ posts and online conversation shifted.

The study proved “emotional contagion”: people who saw happier posts tended to say happier things on the platform, and those exposed to what the study called “negative emotional content” tended to say more pessimistic things.

In poor countries, this problem is exacerbated by the social network’s monopoly power. As the world’s largest social media platform with a market cap in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Facebook relies on acquiring new users in developing countries. Already, the platform is the dominant communications and news channel for much of the developing world. In Burma, for instance, more people have Facebook than have regular access to electricity.