Facebook apologises for role in anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka in 2018

May 13, 2020 Article

Facebook’s failure to remove hate speech and falsehoods may have contributed to real-world anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka in 2018, a human rights report has found.

The report, published by Article One on May 11, was the product of a two-year partnership with the social media giant, which involved conducting human rights assessments in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

In a
statement to Bloomberg, Facebook ‘deplored’ the misuse of its platform, adding,
“We recognize, and apologize for, the very real human rights impacts that
resulted.”

The Article One report gives much focus to the violence in Kandy during broader anti-Muslim and Islamophobic riots. Ethnonationalist and Buddhist nationalist groups had torched Muslim homes and businesses, mosques were also damaged, with at least one reported fatality, of a man trapped inside of a burning house.

According to Hidayath Saththar, a provincial council member, identified
by the New York Times in its 2018 coverage, reported that four mosques, 37
houses, 46 businesses and multiple vehicles were damaged.

The Reuters news agency had reported how Buddhist nationalists had
more broadly “protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim
Rohingya asylum-seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist
nationalism has also been on the rise.”

Muslims in the village of Mullegama, speaking to the Associated Press, described how the police did nothing to stop the violence.

Coverage from multiple international sources reported how
the violence was spurred on by the death of a Buddhist youth, with many defying
a police curfew. There was no evidence of a bias motive in the attack, but
anti-Muslim voices used
the death as a pretext for further anti-Muslim violence.

The extent of the anti-Muslim and Islamophobic violence forced a temporary
ban on Facebook.

Before and in the aftermath of the violence, Facebook extremists used dehumanising
language in their calls for violence against Muslims, even
posting detailed instructions about creating petrol bombs.

But for years, politicians and civil society groups had warned the social
media giant that ethnonationalist and Buddhist nationalists were using the
platform to target Muslims, women, and other minorities. One influential
report, published
by the think tank Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2014, identified twenty
ethnonationlist hate groups targeting women and minorities, with a vast
majority still active on Facebook four years later, according
to a detailed report in BuzzFeed News.

A New York Times investigation, drawing from testimonies from victims,
officials, and ordinary people, argued that Facebook’s newsfeed had a “central
role in nearly every step from rumor to killing.” Facebook had declined
to answer at length to specific questions about its role in the violence, as a
spokeswoman quoted over email, referred to its steps to remove content when
made aware.

The most infamous example of an anti-Muslim falsehood
derived from
Sinhalese-speaking Facebook, with memes and unfounded
claims that Muslims were spiking food with sterilisation pills to destroy
the country’s ethnic majority.

It resulted in a crowd attacking a Muslim restauranter destroying his shop
before a mosque was set alight. The so-called ‘confession’ was filmed and would
become another a viral anti-Muslim falsehood.

A similar conspiracy about Muslims and sterilisation appeared
in a Reuters investigation one year later. It found no evidence to substantiate
claims that a Muslim doctor had, in secret, sterilised 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist
women.

The Reuters investigation also
revealed that the falsehood appeared one week after Buddhist nationalists had
used the Easter terror attacks which killed 269 people
in coordinated suicide bombings, as a pretext to destroy Muslim homes, stores,
and mosques in the northwestern province of the country.

Academics have documented
examples of the exponential spread of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic content on
Facebook from Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka. One page, with over 13,000 ‘likes’
had produced 71 anti-Muslim and Islamophobic image graphics between January and
May 2013. The group’s name in English ‘Safe Buddhism’ had
a more menacing name in Sinhala, which read as, “End Muslim barbarity against
Sinhala Buddhist harmony”.

Facebook also lacked
the staff to monitor hate speech in Sinhalese and Burmese, according to
academics. BuzzFeed News identified
through officials and civil society groups that, as of March 2018, it had just
two Sinhalese-speaking moderators, who both live outside of Sri Lanka, in a country
with over 4 million active users.

According to the Article One assessment,
“Facebook’s lack of formal human rights due diligence in Sri Lanka prior to
this HRIA and the limited cultural and language expertise among Facebook staff
at the time of the May 2018 Kandy incident may have contributed to offline harm
stemming from online engagement.” An issue which was exacerbated further by a
now-removed algorithm designed to drive engagement on the platform.

Nor did Facebook implement its Community Standards in a conducive manner,
allowing forms of harassment and hate speech to grow or remain on the platform,
Article One found.
Examples of anti-dehumanising Muslim language cited in the report included, “Kill
all Muslims, don’t even save an infant; they are dogs.”

The Article One report also highlights a decade of frustrations for civil
society groups who felt shut out by the platform following repeated attempts
(including phone calls and published reports) to highlight the misuse of its
platform and offline violence, until the government shutdown of social media in
2018.

Facebook published detailed statements in response to the Article One
reports on
May 12, adding how it is
“using proactive detection technology to identify potentially violating hate
speech, developing machine learning capabilities in Sinhala and Bahasa
Indonesia.”

They have also employed more policy leads and program managers in Sri
Lanka, Indonesia and Cambodia, and hiring more
content reviewers who speak Sinhala, Tamil, Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese and
Khmer.

Despite significant criticism, Article One found that a majority of the 74
stakeholders engaged, found value in Facebook in Sri Lanka when managed
effectively, adding that marginalised groups including human rights activists
and LGBTQI+ individuals found safe spaces on the platform. But the report did
highlight how their fundamental rights and that of women and children, may have
been upended.

Article One also
called on Facebook to acknowledge the harms it may have caused and to make
the findings of such reports public.

The post Facebook apologises for role in anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka in 2018 appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: News, Sri Lanka

The Preacher Hustle

May 13, 2020 Article

As the COVID-19 lockdown has progressed, Mosques and other religious venues have been eerily empty. Ramadan has started and the COVID-19 induced disruption of the rituals that Ramadan usually consists of, has given Muslims a unique opportunity to examine the religious status quo.

Religion is like marmite; there are those who love it, those who hate it and those who feel everything in between. It is extremely personal. One thing I can say for certain is that in most cases religion creates a glass ceiling that inhibits true human unity because there is the inevitable othering of the non-believer. When this othering becomes absolute, it is often the first step for many of those who I have worked with on the other side of a terrorist conviction.

I learned the term “preacher hustle” from Ismael when he questioned me after one of the informal talks I gave at Cafe Sara off Edgware road. Cafe Sara was a fashionable sheesha venue that was a second home for middle eastern professional criminals. I later found out Ismael was a former PKK assassin who was now selling his trade on the street. His question was whether what I was doing, speaking to them about connecting to a higher consciousness beyond imagination and appetite, was a “Preacher Hustle”; he was puzzled by my continued talks and regular support for this community without the presence of a charity bucket.

The evangelical vigour of the 90’s Dawaah movement was a powerful force pre-9/11 and the Islam that it propagated had less of the political top down ambition and more of a relational understanding that emphasised brotherhood and community. Something attractive to those coming from a underclass background like myself. Perhaps it was the fact that my early experience was idealistic and I was surrounded by converts whose experiences echoed Malcolm X’s words;

“I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God— with fellow‐Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, and whose hair was the blondest of blond—yet it was the first time in my life that I didn’t see them as ‘white’ men. I could look into their faces and see that these didn’t regard themselves as ‘white’”.

However, this entry level romantic humanism was soon hi-jacked by the religious paradigm. Religion as a concept in the west relates to a set of beliefs that is held by a group of people reflected in a world view and often expressed with some form of ritual. The divine laws dictated within these belief systems are based on texts. This creates a transactional system where the religious observer abstains from sin to be awarded with a divinely authorised version of the same thing in the next life. This reward system fits perfectly into a consumer system that also relies upon imagination but never liberates the individual from his lower consciousness or reptilian mind. So in other words, anticipate and dream over buying that expensive leather coat, restrict yourself by not spending on anything else then you will be rewarded with the leather coat. And see yourselves as part of the cooler group and look down upon those without.

This text based simplistic understanding and its validation through proselytising was something that I saw a lot of when I first discovered Islam with the Malcolm X craze in the nineties. I had grown up in a single parent family on a white underclass estate in Farnborough just outside of the army town of Aldershot. The area was also one of the drugs hubs for the south of England. We had moved there when I was 8 from East London and my father left shortly afterwards leaving my mother to care for three children through being made homeless and living in a hostel to the daily racism and violence of a xenophobic community where we were the only asians.

Ben, who was one of the elders in our gang initially started looking into Islam. I recall watching Ahmed Deedat debate Christian preachers on video tape. Each of the debaters would be grasping his text book whether Quran or Bible and trying to prove the other wrong by referring to the text.

In the 90’s the concept of atheism was not within mainstream thought and schools still sung hymns but the paradigm that Islam was taking was distinctly western. Ahmed Deedat’s methodology of debate was something formalised in Europe during the reformation.

This was in contrast to what had happened in the 60’s when Europeans were travelling to the East to study Islam as an Eastern Philosophy and bringing back the teachings of Maulana Rumi and Ibn Arabi but in between we had the re-contextualisation of the term Jihad in order to propagate recruitment to the Afghan conflict and Saudi sponsored Mosques with £20000 pound sponsorships.

As someone who has spent over a decade in the rehabilitation of the some of the toughest Terrorists and most recently IS members, I cannot help but raise my head above the pulpit and ask “Is anyone looking at the BS that these guys are following?” As the late great Robert Anton Wilson said “Your always following someones belief system, someones b s!”

Let me be clear that I am not attacking the ritualistic practice or an individual searching for spiritual awakening within a collective through moral symbolisms of systems like Islam, Hinduism, Judaism etc. I am simply asking all of us who proscribe ourselves to a particular group to consider the possibility of stepping back from own imagined allegiances to a more universal perspective. To consider the fact that everyone is searching for tranquility and that if someone is aggressive towards you, it is a veil borne of their own vulnerability. To consider we approach each other without ego and with compassion and truly understand and practice the othering does not separate us from the one true community of this earth; the community of humanity. I do not claim any enlightenment but I do bask in the reward of love and stillness that such an approach delivers and it is this that compels me to invite you to join me.

The post The Preacher Hustle appeared first on Faith Matters.

Categories: Community, mosques, Opinions, Preacher Hustle