“This case is about what happens when a powerful company has this unchecked power over the world,” he said. The lawsuit is a good test case for courts to limit how much immunity platforms are afforded, said David Mindell, a partner at Edelson PC, one of the law firms that brought the suit. While the technology industry and others have long held that Section 230 is a crucial protection, the statute has become increasingly controversial as the power of internet companies has grown.Įarlier this year, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg laid out steps to reform the law, saying that companies should have immunity from liability only if they follow best practices for removing damaging material from their platforms. “Based on the precedents, this case should lose,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. “But you’ve got so much antipathy towards Facebook nowadays – anything is possible.” The Rohingya complaint says it seeks to apply Myanmar law to the claims if Section 230 is raised as a defence. complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook.īut in the United States, platforms such as Facebook are protected from liability over content posted by users by a law known as Section 230. United Nations human rights investigators said in 2018 that the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fuelled the violence against the Rohingya.Ī Reuters investigation that year, cited in the U.S. Myanmar authorities say they were battling an insurgency and deny carrying out systematic atrocities. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and burning of villages. 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. In recent times we have seen climate-change litigation becoming more commonplace and getting some wins,” she added. “Strategic litigation like this – you never know where it can go.
The lawsuit itself is quite a bold move, but the Rohingya clearly felt there were sufficient grounds,” she said. “The timing of these announcements shows the lawsuit is a wake-up call. It was a sign that the tech giant was rattled, said Debbie Stothard, founder of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), an advocacy group. We’ve also invested in Burmese-language technology to reduce the prevalence of violating content.”Ī day after the lawsuit was filed, Meta said it would ban several accounts linked to the Myanmar military, and said on Wednesday it had built a new artificial intelligence system that can adapt more easily to take action on new or evolving types of harmful content faster. “We’ve built a dedicated team of Burmese speakers, banned the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military), disrupted networks manipulating public debate and taken action on harmful misinformation to help keep people safe. In an earlier statement in response to the lawsuit, a Meta spokesperson said the company was “appalled by the crimes committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar.”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment. It will be an injustice if Rohingya survivors are not compensated for their losses,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The survivors have no option other than a lawsuit against Facebook.
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But in Myanmar, there is no law for the Rohingya,” said Nay San Lwin, co-founder of advocacy group Free Rohingya Coalition, who has faced abuse on Facebook. While analysts are split over the merits of the case and its chances of success, Rohingya activists said their status of being deemed illegal immigrants in Myanmar left them with few options.
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The $150 billion class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that Facebook’s failure to police content and its platform’s design contributed to violence against the Rohingya community.īritish lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office.
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