Facebook bans Myanmar’s military chief for hate speech

Bloomberg

Facebook Inc. has removed accounts and pages linked to Myanmar’s top military officials as a new United Nations report accused the country’s armed forces of committing war crimes against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. On Monday, Facebook removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages that were followed by nearly 12 million people, the company said in a blog post. It is banning 20 individuals and organisations, including commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing and the military’s Myawaddy television network. “We want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions,” Facebook said.
The move comes on the same day that a United Nations Human Rights Council-mandated fact-finding mission issued a report accusing the senior general and other top commanders of acting with “genocidal intent” towards the Muslim Rohingya, nearly 1 million of whom have fled into neighbouring Bangladesh. The UN report, which calls the military’s so-called “clearance operations” a “human rights catastrophe”, quotes a 2017 Facebook post from the general as proof the military pre-planned its attacks on the Rohingya.