The anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim invective analyzed for this article – which was collected by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law – includes material that’s been up on Facebook for as long as six years. Almost all are in the main local language, Burmese. The remarks are among more than 1,000 examples Reuters found of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week. The post appeared 11 days after Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote. “We need to destroy their race.” That post went up last September, as the violence against the Rohingya peaked.Ī third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water and our ethnic people,” the user wrote. That post went up in December 2013.Īnother post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication about attacks on police stations by Rohingya militants. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya. One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”įour months after Zuckerberg’s pledge to act, here is a sampling of posts from Myanmar that were viewable this month on Facebook: In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. YANGON, Myanmar – In April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S.