Tue 07 December 2021:
Myanmarese Rohingya refugees have filed a $150 billion lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, alleging that the social media firm did not take action against anti-Rohingya hate speech that contributed to bloodshed.
The company’s failures to control material and the platform’s design, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, contributed to real-world violence endured by the Rohingya population. British lawyers also sent a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office as part of a coordinated operation.
After a military crackdown that included mass executions and rape, more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017. Civilians have been killed and villages have been burned, according to human rights organizations.
After the Feb. 1 coup, Facebook admitted that it was “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” in Myanmar, but that it has already taken actions to address platform abuses in the region, including blocking the military from using Facebook and Instagram.
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 Burmese 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 Burmese 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.”
An investigation into allegations of crimes in the region has been initiated by the International Criminal Court. In September, a federal judge in the United States ordered Facebook to reveal records of accounts linked to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar that the company had deactivated.
Human rights investigators from the United Nations claimed in 2018 that the usage of Facebook had played a crucial part in the transmission of hate speech that fueled the violence. According to the US complaint, a Reuters investigation that year found over 1,000 examples of posts, comments, and images on Facebook attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims.
Myanmar’s government claims to be fighting an insurgency and denies committing systematic killings.
(with agency)
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