Rohingya refugees sue Meta for £150bn for Facebook enabling genocide

The social media giant was 'willing to trade the lives' of people for better market penetration, they allege

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are suing Facebook owner Meta over allegations that the platform ignored inflammatory posts and hate speech against the ethnic group, leading to the genocide of its members in the south-east Asian country formally called Burma.

Lawyers for victims of the 2017 massacres and displacements launched the coordinated legal action against the social media giant in the UK and the United States, seeking more than £150 billion ($200 billion) in compensation in one of the largest group claims for victims of a crime against humanity.

In the US, the class action complaint [pdf] was filed in the northern district court in San Francisco. It alleged that Facebook was "willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration" in Myanmar.

"Facebook is like a robot programmed with a singular mission: to grow. And the undeniable reality is that Facebook's growth, fuelled by hate, division and misinformation, has left hundreds of thousands of devastated Rohingya lives in its wake," the complaint states.

"In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward."

The lawsuit also cited a probe by the United Nations that described Facebook as having played a "determining role" in the genocide of 24,000 Rohingya people in Myanmar.

In 2018, Facebook also acknowledged in a blog post that it needs to "do more" to prevent its platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence in different parts of the world.

However, the company is largely protected in the US from allegations of inciting genocide under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which means attorneys representing the Rohingya refugees will seek to apply Myanmar laws to their claims.

In the UK, law firm McCue Jury & Partners has sent a letter of notice to Facebook's UK office, notifying that its clients "intend to bring proceedings against FB UK in the High Court."

The letter said that the genocide campaign in Myanmar was carried out by the nation's ruling regime and civilian extremists, and was fomented by extensive material published on Facebook.

"Despite Facebook's recognition of its culpability and its pronouncements about its role in the world, there has not been a single penny of compensation, nor any other form of reparations or support, offered to any survivor," the letter said, according to The Guardian.

The lawsuit against Facebook comes more than a month after whistleblower Frances Haugen told a British parliamentary select committee that the social network was exacerbating online hate worldwide because its algorithms are designed to promote divisive content.

"The events we're seeing around the world, things like Myanmar and Ethiopia, those are the opening chapters because engagement-based ranking does two things: one, it prioritises and amplifies divisive and polarising extreme content and two it concentrates it," Ms Haugen, who worked as product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team, told MPs.

She said Facebook's internal culture prioritises profitability over its impact on the wider world, and that "there is no will at the top to make sure these systems are run in an adequately safe way."

"Until we bring in a counterweight, these things will be operated for the shareholders' interest and not the public interest."

Haugen added that Facebook's moderation systems are not efficient at catching content in languages other than English.