The Daily - When Facebook Rumors Incite Real Violence

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

A series of damning posts on Facebook has stoked longstanding ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka, setting off a wave of violence largely directed at Muslims. How are false rumors on social media fueling real-world attacks? Guests: Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who have reported on Sri Lanka for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in Sri Lanka, Buddhists were already suspicious of Muslims. Then came a series of damning posts on Facebook. How fake rumors on social media are fueling real violence in developing countries. It's Wednesday, May 16th. Sri Lanka has long-standing tensions between different ethnic groups. Three-quarters of Sri Lanka's population is Sinhalese and overwhelmingly Buddhist.

There's the majority who are Sinhalese Buddhist and also two minority groups, Tamils and Muslims. Tension has been on the rise in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka since 2012, said to have been fueled by hardline Buddhists. Those tensions had existed for a while. They are destroying our Buddhist sites, and we definitely cannot by as Buddhists and watch as that is happening. But then in late February, suddenly there was an explosion of violence.

And what's behind that violence in particular? The short answer is rumors on Facebook. Amanda Taub and her colleague, Max Fisher, have been reporting on the violence in Sri Lanka. They all kind of came down to this idea that the Muslim minority in the country was somehow out to get the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. That the Muslims in parliament were secret extremists controlled by Saudi Arabia, that Muslim doctors were out secretly sterilizing Buddhist women, that Muslim clothes sellers were putting drugs in underwear

that they would sell to Sinhalese women to sterilize them. The really, really big one was that Muslims were putting sterilization pills into food that they would serve to Buddhists to sterilize them to wipe out the Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka. So just to be clear, these rumors, they are 100% not true. 100% not true. Totally, totally made up. So as best we could tell, even watching from London,

these rumors were basically perceived like they were broadcast in the evening news and were treated as true pretty much universally among the Buddhists in the country. And you could watch it spreading just like wildfire across Facebook, totally unchallenged, people discussing it, sharing it with each other. So, you know, we kind of talked about it for a day. They said, we have to go. To Sri Lanka. Yes. We basically ran to the embassy and tried to get a visa as soon as possible.

And I think then we bought our plane tickets and were on a flight about eight hours after that. Tell me about getting to Sri Lanka. What happens when you arrive? We knew from the moment we got there that one of the people we really wanted to find was this guy named Athamlebe Farsith, who was a Muslim guy from a little town called Ampra in the east of the country.

And he worked as a cashier at a small, humble one-room restaurant owned by some of his older brothers that they had built after saving up some money from work in Saudi Arabia. He was not the easiest to find, but we went out to Ampera and in a village kind of near there did manage to find, but we went out to Amphara and in a village kind of near there, did manage to find him finally. And I actually ended up visiting with Farsith and sitting down with a translator, having quite a few cups of tea and talking to him about what happened.

He described this night where he was working at the restaurant, totally normal night, I think maybe a Tuesday, and a customer comes in, a Sinhalese Buddhist guy. He's seen him before. He knows who he is. And he was asking, beef? Beef? You have heavy beef? Serves him up a plate of beef, leaves the customer with the food, goes back to the register, and he notices at one point that this customer is shouting about something. We couldn't understand because he's not fluent in English.

And Farseth is telling me that he has no idea what this customer is saying, because like most Muslims in the country he speaks this language Tamil and most Buddhists in the country like this customer speak this other language Sinhalese so he figures he's probably just drunk and kind of dismisses it but he notices after a few minutes that some other people are gathering around and they seem really mad too. And maybe there's 15, 20 people, and now they're gathering around Farsif. And all of a sudden, in the course of just a few minutes, what has gone from one customer shouting over who knows what

has turned into this mob. And Farsif is kind of a short guy, very unassuming, very quiet guy. And he's terrified. He was only in fear. Because this mob is bellowing at him and they look really scary and really threatening. And he can't quite understand what they're saying. But he's getting the sense that it has something to do with

there was something in the customer's food. Flour. That was a piece. But he's getting the sense that it has something to do with there was something in the customer's food. And he had indeed put a little bit of flour to kind of thicken the sauce in his food. So he got the sense that that was what it was about. And he also really got the sense that this mob was maybe going to attack him if he didn't admit to whatever they were asking him to admit. So he manages to kind of mumble out in this very broken Sinhalese. Say yes. Right. Yes, I put it.

This guy was asking him whether this is a tablet. Whether this tablet. What they thought was that they had found a sterilization pill in this plate of food. So this seemed like evidence not just that he had done this, but that he was part of a conspiracy across the entire Muslim majority that was threatening Sri Lanka's Sinhalese Buddhists. So what happens to Farsith right after he makes this inadvertent admission?

So the mob just collapses on top of him. They beat him for, he told me he thought it was 30 minutes. I mean, it's impossible to say. He thought my last day is today. That was his last day. him for, he told me he thought it was 30 minutes. I mean, it's impossible to say. And he was convinced that they were going to kill him. Only after 45 minutes, police came to the scene. That must have been terrible. Yeah. I was the only Muslim there.

All I said was the same. And he kind of looks up and realizes that the shop that was his entire family's livelihood is completely trash. This mob picks up, marches across town to the town mosque, burns it down, tries to kill the imam there, but he also escapes. So when Farsif wakes up the next mosque, burns it down, tries to kill the imam there, but he also escapes. So when Farsif wakes up the next morning in this police station, this restaurant has been destroyed, the mosque has been destroyed. And that's really kind of it for the Muslim community in Ampera. So it turned out that this didn't end in Ampera

because somebody in that crowd that had shouted and then attacked Farsith had a smartphone. And they had filmed the part where he seemed to admit putting sterilization pills in these customers' food. The video was uploaded to Facebook, and it quickly went viral across Sri Lanka. It's just building up this online anger and fear to a fever pitch. And around the time this video was going viral, hundreds of kilometers away near another city called Kandy, a Buddhist truck driver got into a traffic altercation with a group of Muslims.

They beat him severely. And a couple of days later, he died. A new round of rumors started to go around that this guy had been killed because he was a Buddhist and that it was part of this Muslim uprising and plot to wipe out the Buddhist majority. Buddhist gangs rioted following the death of a Sinhalese truck driver and set Muslim-owned homes and businesses on fire. Within a day or two, they had fanned out to several towns. The victims are Muslims.

They are being beaten, their shops being burned, and several have lost their lives. Both the Muslim-dominated eastern Sri Lanka as well as Sri Lanka's holiest town, Kandy. Dozens of people were left homeless and pushed into internally displaced person camps. This 27-year-old guy named Abdul Basith was trapped in his parents' home trying to help them escape and burn to death. A young Muslim man's body was found in a burned-out building on Tuesday. And it was right after that the government declared a state of emergency and shut down social media access throughout the country.

Sri Lanka has declared a state of emergency amidst violence against the Muslim community in Sri Lanka. The military has been deployed to the city of Kandy and a curfew has been imposed after Muslim-owned homes and businesses were damaged in riots. Hundreds of police have been deployed to stem the violence and authorities have blocked social media in some areas. It's pretty remarkable to think about this, but what started as a rumor on Facebook and then was fueled by these incidents again on Facebook could incite violence that essentially consumes an entire country. Yeah. In the real world, you could say these things were hundreds of miles apart. They were people who had nothing to do with each other. Totally different cities, totally different circumstances. But on Facebook, it looked like part of the same thing. It looked like part of the same plot and phenomenon. It looked like part of the same thing. It looked like part of the same plot and phenomenon.

One government official who we spoke to, I think, put it really well. He said, the germs were ours, but Facebook was the wind. The country had pre-existing tensions and divisions, but suddenly Facebook was this new force that allowed them to spread so quickly and so widely that it just really got out of hand. We'll be right back. I want to understand, why is Facebook such a powerful force in Sri Lanka? Almost everywhere we went in the country, and we went to some pretty rural, remote places, people would recite the same Facebook rumors to us. They would show us the same Facebook memes.

Things that appeared on Facebook were just true. And everyone experienced them because Facebook is the internet for a lot of people. It sets up these special sweetheart deals with cell phone companies where you have special fee-less web browsing if you use the Facebook app. So everybody uses Facebook for their portal for communication, for information. It replaces everybody's media diet. And it's driven almost entirely by raw desires and will of the users on the site because everything is driven by an algorithm that runs on what is the content that is going to get people to click on it the most. And what we know about

human nature is it's the stuff that's going to touch on negative primal emotions like anger and fear and the stuff that touches on a sense of us versus them tribal identity. And these rumors in Sri Lanka, the video of Farsith, the stuff about this truck driver who had been killed, was perfect to write on that. How aware is Facebook that all this is happening in real time in Sri Lanka? When we got there, people kept telling us we told them. We had been warning Facebook. We saw all of this happening. We saw these posts rising.

And we told them and nothing happened. They pretty much always got the same response, which was this doesn't violate our community standards. We suggest that if you don't want to see it, you block this person. And it turned out that a big part of the problem was that Facebook didn't actually have enough moderators who could speak Sinhalese to moderate this content. So you could report and report and report posts, but there was nobody who would be able to understand them. And the company seems to have defaulted to just leaving things up. But then once the government declared a state of emergency and shut down social media access, Facebook got in touch right away and suddenly were very interested

in hearing what they had to say. So Facebook became most active in the situation when Facebook was no longer allowed to be used in Sri Lanka. Right. The thing you have to understand is the countries where misinformation and hate speech are likeliest to spread and where institutions are weak so that misinformation hate speech is the likeliest to lead to violence. They're not particularly valuable markets for Facebook. Places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Indonesia, they don't derive that much revenue from them. Now, in a business sense, it's very important to the company to have a really large market

position in those countries because they think one day in the future it might be valuable financially to have users there. But their focus is really on expanding as quickly as possible. Why is it so easy for these rumors to lead to violence in places without strong institutions, as you're describing it? without strong institutions, as you're describing it? When people don't have faith in institutions like the police, the justice system, they're more likely to take matters into their own hands and turn to vigilante justice in order to protect themselves or their communities. And that's something that predates Facebook. But when Facebook introduces these rumors and kind of juices them up on steroids with

its algorithm and makes it so easy to share them and believe them, then that interacts with those underlying tendencies towards vigilante violence in ways that can be incredibly dangerous. Isn't there a case to be made that people acting on animosity that already exists, that's just baked into a society, that that's not Facebook's responsibility? That these tensions would play out somehow, even if it weren't on Facebook. It would just find another medium, another platform. just find another medium, another platform. No, the way that Facebook reorganizes the way that you interact with the rest of the world, the way that it naturally funnels you into like-minded groups and promotes the content that will most charge up your emotions, it changes the way that you see the rest of the world and the way that you interact with it.

And it's not just these cases of big communal violence. You know, there was one case we found in rural Indonesia in Java where these rumors spread about child kidnapping gangs. And it hit on anti-Chinese sentiment in this very complicated way. And within like a week of this rumor spreading in the very rural part of a very developing part of the world, nine different towns spontaneously lynched people who were coming through the towns. It could not happen without Facebook and social media and without hate speech and misinformation coursing through it the way it does.

So we're talking to you two back in London. So you've left Sri Lanka. But what has become of the violence that started there because of these rumors on Facebook? What's happening now? So the violence there has died down. Facebook has turned back on. But I keep thinking about something that an activist we met with in Colombo named Sanjana Hathotua said.

We were discussing Facebook's response, and I asked him if he thought maybe Facebook would have learned from this so that if violence broke out somewhere else, this wouldn't happen again the same way. And he looked at me and he said, somewhere else, this is going to happen again here. this is going to happen again here. And what's happened to Farseth, that restaurant worker? He and his brothers are living in hiding. They have no income because the restaurant was destroyed. They're deeply in debt because they had taken out a lot of money to build the restaurant. They don't feel safe working in the area, so they don't go out much. But the thing that

blows my mind is that what he does with all of his downtime now is he reads Facebook. So you prefer to read social media? Yeah. He told me that he, you know, now that he's not working, he can't go out,

he spends a ton of time sitting around on his phone just browsing through Facebook. And I told him, you know, but Facebook, I mean, it ruined your life. It almost got you killed. You might have to flee the country because of it. How could you even trust what's on it, much less want to open it? What did he say? He just kind of shrugged and he said, you know, it's cheaper than buying a newspaper. Whether wrong or right or anything, it goes through.

And whether it's right or wrong, it's what I read. Okay. Thank you both very much. Max, Amanda, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. Here's what else you need to know today. Today's session was called to discuss the issue of violence in the Middle East.

We are all concerned about violence in Gaza was caused by the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Those who suggest that the Gaza violence has anything to do with the location of the American embassy are sorely mistaken. Rather, the violence comes from those who reject the existence of the state of Israel in any location. Haley blamed the death of at least 60 Palestinians at the Israeli border on Hamas, which governs Gaza, and its ally, Iran, saying that both have deliberately stoked the violence and prompted what she called a justified response from Israeli soldiers. I asked my colleagues here in the Security Council, who among us would accept this type of activity on your border? No one would. No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has. In fact, the records of several countries here today suggest

they would be much less restrained. And President Trump's choice to run the CIA, Gina Haspel, has won the support of the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, all but assuring

her confirmation. Warner's support came after Haspel wrote him a letter condemning the CIA's detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, a denunciation she had refused to make during her confirmation hearings last week. Finally, in a surprise late-night decision, North Korea abruptly canceled peace talks with South Korea, scheduled for today, and cast doubt on next month's summit between Kim Jong-un and President Trump. North Korea said it was protesting a long-planned joint military exercise involving troops from the U.S. and South Korea. The military exercises are routine, but North Korea seems offended by the timing amid intense diplomatic

negotiations with both countries, calling it an unnecessary provocation. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.