Facebook being Weaponized
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
Facebook has become one of the biggest platforms for political propaganda and misinformation today. The biggest example today of the dangers of this is Myanmar. Facebook is so popular in Myanmar, many people think of it synonymous with the internet. The Myanmar military took advantage of this to launch a mass fake news campaign to spread racially charges fake news story to incite a genocide against the Islamic minority in Myanmar. These hate-speech propaganda posts incited a violent ethnic cleansing and more than 700,000 Muslims being forced to flee in a year. This is one of the first examples of an authoritarian government using social networks against its own people.
The Myanmar military weaponized Facebook by using its peoples online social networks to spread misinformation and hate-speech. Rather than like email-span, which targets people randomly, the Myanmar military used networks to strategically spread fake news. Myanmar’s military used entertainment accounts like Burmese models, pop stars, and beauty bloggers to generate big followings and then spread racially charged fake news. By targeting strong nodes that are powerful in their networks, like celebrities in their fan base, they could target millions of people. This information then spread like wildfire through Myanmar Facebook because Facebook is designed to spread news and information quickly throughout people’s personal social networks, so by spreading fake news to one person they themselves then spread it to all their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers. This instance is a scary warning of how social networks can be politicized and weaponized. The Myanmar genocide stands out as a frightening violent example of the dangers of the growing popularity of Facebook as a political propaganda tool. This has put increasing pressure on tech companies to take responsibility as a facilitator in these events by creating a platform that can be so effectively weaponized with few barriers preventing it.