A US class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday
by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that the company's failures to
police content and its platform's design contributed to real-world violence
faced by the Rohingya community.
In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a
letter of notice to Facebook's London office.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request
for comment about the lawsuit. The company has said it was "too slow to
prevent misinformation and hate" in Myanmar and has said it has since
taken steps to crack down on platform abuses in the region, including banning
the military from Facebook and Instagram after the February 1 coup.
Facebook has said it is protected from liability over
content posted by users by a US Internet law known as Section 230, which holds
that online platforms are not liable for content posted by third parties. The
complaint says it seeks to apply Myanmar law to the claims if Section 230 is
raised as a defense.
Although US courts can apply foreign law to cases where the
alleged harms and activity by companies took place in other countries, two
legal experts interviewed by Reuters said they did not know of a successful
precedent for foreign law being invoked in lawsuits against social media
companies where Section 230 protections could apply.
Anupam Chander, a professor at Georgetown University Law
Center, said that invoking Myanmar law wasn't "inappropriate." But he
predicted that "it's unlikely to be successful," saying that "it
would be odd for Congress to have foreclosed actions under US law but permitted
them to proceed under foreign law."
More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar's Rakhine
state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included
mass killings and rape. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and
burning of villages.
Myanmar authorities say they were battling an insurgency and
deny carrying out systematic atrocities.
A Myanmar junta spokesman did not answer phone calls from
Reuters seeking comment on the legal action against Facebook.
In 2018, UN human rights investigators said the use of
Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fuelled the
violence. A Reuters investigation that year, cited in the US complaint, found
more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya
and other Muslims on Facebook.
The International Criminal Court has opened a case into the
accusations of crimes in the region. In September, a US federal judge ordered
Facebook to release records of accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in
Myanmar that the social media giant had shut down.
The new class-action lawsuit references claims by Facebook
whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked a cache of internal documents this
year, that the company does not police abusive content in countries where such
speech is likely to cause the most harm.
The complaint also cites recent media reports, including a
Reuters report last month, that Myanmar's military was using fake social media
accounts to engage in what is widely referred to in the military as
"information combat."
Mohammed Taher, a refugee living in the sprawling Bangladesh
camps that are home to more than a million Rohingya, said Facebook had been
widely used to spread anti-Rohingya propaganda. "We welcome the
move," he said by phone.
© Reuters
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