Since a chief attorney claimed the organization suppressed facts, Facebook has exchanged data with United Nations experts investigating human crimes in Myanmar. A spokesperson of Facebook on Tuesday announced that it had deleted data from pages and profiles linked to the Myanmar military from the Independent Investigation Mechanism (IIMM) in order to prevent hate speech against Rohingya in 2018 but refused to explain information.
“We will keep on working with all of these inquiries and include details related to the prosecution of illegal actions in Myanmar,” said the official. Myanmar faces genocide charges at the ICJ in 2017 in connection with a military repression against Rohingya forcing 730,000 people to flee to Bangladesh.
Myanmar rejects racism and claims it is carrying out legal operations against protesters targeting police stations. A 2018 IIMM was created by the United Nations Human Rights Council to collect proof of alleged crimes in Myanmar. Researcher from the UN said that Facebook has been effective in promoting speeches of hate that fuel violence. In 2018, the company confirmed it had deleted 18 profiles, including its head officer, and also deleted 52 different Facebook pages affiliated with the Burmese military, but kept the records.
This week, the president of the IIMM told that, “while Facebook has promised to comply, it had not published evidence of “serious international crimes.” On Tuesday, he reported that the organization has got “the first dataset that satisfies our previous demands in part.” “I hope this represents a further step towards cooperating, enabling us to obtain critical information of serious international crimes,” he said in an e-mail.
