Rohingya refugees have sued Facebook over claims the social media giant had a significant role in the hate-speech campaign which led to the violent persecution of the Rohingya, exacerbating the violence against the vulnerable Myanmar minority.
The class-action lawsuit representing some 10,000 refugees of the Muslim minority group in Myanmar, in which the plaintiffs are demanding $150 billion in damages in addition to punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, was filed on Monday in California by its legal representatives from law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC.
The lawsuit alleges that the social media giant, which began operating in Myanmar back in 2011, had been aware for years of posts targeting the Rohingya, including those through which the Myanmar government was ordering hits by, that were spreading wildly, but did nothing to stem hate speech on its platform.
The document states that Facebook contributed materially to the development and widespread dissemination of anti-Rohingya hate speech that had led later to the Rohingya genocide.
It claims that even when alerted about hate speech, Facebook failed to remove offending posts in a timely manner, worrying, above all, about better market penetration in the country, willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya in the process.
According to Doctors Without Borders, the international medical charity, more than 10,000 Rohingya were killed during the military crackdown in Myanmar in 2017 with another over half of the Rohingya in the country – more than 700,000 people – being forced to escape to neighboring Bangladesh.
UN officials described Myanmar’s actions as ethnic cleansing, not ruling out a charge of genocide.
Meanwhile, there’s a big chance that Facebook will soon face a similar lawsuit in the UK where lawyers representing a group of Rohingyas from a refugee camp in Bangladesh are allegedly planning to lodge a complaint against the company in the High Court next year.
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