US judge orders Facebook to hand over Myanmar officials' posts against Rohingya to Gambia

A United States judge has directed the social media giant Facebook to let the Gambia government access the deleted posts where Myanmar officials promoted hate against the Rohingya people. As per The Verge report, the order by the District of Colombia came after Facebook rejected a request for the data by the Gambia government. The West African country seeks to use the same posts in a genocide case before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The Gambia has accused Myanmar of violating the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide. 

Facebook has admitted that Myanmar’s military used its website to paint the Rohingya Muslim minority as a terrorist group. The now-deleted posts promoted mass murder, displacement, and other human rights abuses. The social media giant has provided the information separately to the United Nations Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). However, Facebook rejected Gambian prosecutors’ requests to access the data as “extraordinarily broad” and invasive, as per the report.

The US magistrate judge Zia Faruqi ruled that the relevant Facebook posts were not meant as private communications that receive extra legal protection. The order quoted by The Verge states, “Although some of the pages were nominally private, the Myanmar officials intended their reach to be public, and in fact, they reached an audience of nearly 12 million followers” adding that “Making their accounts and pages private would have defeated their goal of inflaming hate in the widest possible audience.”

US judge’s order doesn’t criticise Facebook

Notably, the order by the US judge does not criticise Facebook for deleting the content from the public domain. However, the order does say that the social media giant has not shown that giving the private backups of the same data now would be burdensome or violate any kind of users’ privacy. Faruqui reportedly wrote in the ruling, “Facebook taking up the mantle of privacy rights is rich with irony. News sites have entire sections dedicated to Facebook’s sordid history of privacy scandals.”

Additionally, Facebook is also asked to produce any other non-legally privileged records from its own investigation into the role that the social media platform played in the ‘genocide’ of the Rohingya community. The records could reportedly help the prosecutors in the Gambia to determine how Facebook connected “seemingly unrelated” accounts to Myanmar government officials including which accounts were operated out of the same locations. However, the judge dismissed Gambia’s request for a deposition where the social media platform would explain the documents. 

Faruqui also said in the order that he “came to praise Facebook, not to bury it.” But he denounced the company for failing to cooperate with the Gambian government in the latter’s investigation. He reportedly wrote, “Facebook can act now. It took the first step by deleting the content that fueled a genocide. Yet it has stumbled at the next step, sharing that content...Failing to do so here would compound the tragedy that has befallen the Rohingya.”

Facebook's response to the ruling

In a statement to The Verge, a Facebook spokesperson has also said that the company is “reviewing” Faruqui’s decision. The spokesperson said, “We remain appalled by the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar and support justice for international crimes” adding that, “We’ve committed to disclose relevant information to authorities, and over the past year we’ve made voluntary, lawful disclosures to the IIMM and will continue to do so as the case against Myanmar proceeds.”

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