The social media company said on Thursday that it “treated the situation in Myanmar as an emergency,” adding that it would “significantly reduce the spread of all content” on pages and profiles run by the military called the Tatmadaw, “which are continued to spread misinformation. “
That means people use FacebookFB see significantly less content from those pages in their news feed. Facebook has tens of millions of users in Myanmar.
The company has also “suspended indefinitely” Myanmar’s government agencies from using special channels reserved for officials to send requests to Facebook to remove content, according to a blog post by Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s policy director for emerging economies in the United States. Asia Pacific. region.
He said the company “protects content, including political speeches, that allows the people of Myanmar to speak out and show the world what is happening in their country.”
The accounts that Facebook is restricting include the Tatmadaw information team page, as well as a page operated by Tatmadaw spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun, according to the blog post.
Frankel added that Facebook would no longer recommend the military-run pages to people, making it less likely that people will be directed to those pages.
The Facebook announcement comes just over a week after Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, detaining the country’s mayor Aung San Suu Kyi and numerous other top government figures.
After the coup, internet and news services were disrupted across the country, limiting people’s ability to get information about the events. Facebook last week told CNN that its services were “disrupted for some people.” The country later expanded the block to include Instagram which was owned by Facebook and also TwitterTWTR
The company said on Friday that the blocking order is still in effect. (That doesn’t stop people from accessing Facebook services through virtual private networks or VPNs, which use encryption to disguise Internet traffic.)
Facebook is ubiquitous in Myanmar and is one of the primary means of accessing the Internet for many people.
Marzuki Darusman, the chair of a UN investigation into human rights in Myanmar, once said that “social media is Facebook and Facebook is social media” in the country.
That has also led to a lot of research into how Facebook operates in the market, and it has admitted in the past that it hasn’t done enough to prevent its platform from being used to fuel political division and bloodshed there.
Frankel, Facebook’s policy director, said in his blog post that the company’s efforts to protect the citizens of Myanmar “build on our work since 2018 to keep people safe and reduce the risk of political violence in Myanmar”.
In addition to removing misinformation, he said the company is also helping people who are “reasonably” afraid of detention secure their Facebook accounts, among other measures.
– Rishi Iyengar, James Griffiths and Helen Regan contributed to this report.
