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Facebook takes down more accounts linked to Myanmar military

This image, taken on October 17, 2018, shows employees working in the “War Room” of the Facebook social networking company in Menlo Park, California, the United States. (By AFP)

Facebook has removed hundreds of accounts from its platform linked to Myanmar’s army and used to incite violence against minority Rohingya Muslims.

Facebook said in a blog post late on Tuesday that it had removed 425 pages, 17 groups, and 135 accounts from its social network and 15 accounts from its Instagram photo-sharing service.

The service has previously admitted that its platform is used to run hate speech and incite violence against Rohingya Muslims in the Southeast Asian country.

This is Facebook’s third sweeping removal of pages and accounts for what it calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in Myanmar following deletions in October and August.

The social media giant removed the accounts, including that of Myanmar’s army chief, after criticism that it had failed to act on hate speech amid the escalation of violence against the Rohingya Muslims in the country.

The Rohingya are considered the world’s most persecuted minority, attacked and driven out of their native Rakhine State in northwestern Myanmar in what the United Nations has concluded constitutes “genocide.”

The Rohingya Muslims were subjected to a campaign of killings, rape, arbitrary arrests, and arson attacks by the military and Buddhist mobs in Rakhine mainly between late 2016 and August 2017.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed in that crackdown, and some 700,000 fled their homes since August 2017 to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh.


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