Myanmar is an often cited case study when it comes to the catastrophic impact of disinformation and hate speech shared on Facebook. Myanmar became a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” according to the UN, where in August 2017 more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee violence in Rakhine state.

The country has seen a rapid rise in Facebook users: there were 1.2 million Facebook users in Myanmar in 2014, and by January 2019 there were 21 million.. By January 2021 there was 23.65 million users, about 40% of the population.

Victoire Rio, a digital rights researcher focusing on Myanmar, said Haugen’s testimony shone a spotlight on the discrepancies between what Facebook does in the US and the “lack of action and intervention” in the rest of the world.

At the beginning of Facebook’s presence in Myanmar, there were only two Burmese moderators at Facebook. Now there are 120, according to Rio.

“The amount of investment that’s going into trying to clean up and sanitize the content that gets through in the US is just not there in other parts,” Rio said. “But it took a genocide, it took the UN calling them out on it, and took the US Congress calling them out on it, the western press calling them out on it for, for us to finally be heard,” she said.