Facebook has taken down a number of accounts run by the Myanmar military, saying they were being used for a coordinated hate campaign against the Rohingya people.
In an update published last night, the company says it's removed a total of 135 Facebook accounts, 425 pages and 17 groups, as well as a further 15 Instagram accounts.
The accounts had a wide reach, with around 2.5 million people following at least one. Meanwhile, 6,400 people belonged to at least one of the Facebook groups, while around 1,300 followed at least one of the Instagram accounts.
The company stresses that the accounts were removed for 'coordinated inauthentic behavior', rather than content violations.
"As part of our ongoing investigations into this type of behavior in Myanmar, we discovered that these seemingly independent news, entertainment, beauty and lifestyle Pages were linked to the Myanmar military, and to the Pages we removed for coordinated inauthentic behavior in Myanmar in August," the company explains in a blog post.
"This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook under our misrepresentation policy because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing."
Almost three quarters of the country's mostly-Muslim Rohingya population has fled to Bangladesh, following what the Human Rights council describes as genocide. The government and military, meanwhile, have attempted to paint these actions as counter-terrorism
And as the company points out, Facebook is a particularly prominent source of news in Myanmar, where the news media are heavily censored. Around 20 million people in the country use Facebook - around 40% of the population.
This is Facebook's third big clearout of Myanmar-related accounts, following similar moves in August and October that saw the removal of high-profile figures including hardline nationalist monks and top generals, including the commander-in-chief of the armed forces senior general Min Aung Hlaing.
The company was, perhaps, shamed into action by the publication of a report by the UN that Facebook played a 'determining role' in spreading hate speech against the Rohingya and 'substantively contributed' to dissension and conflict.
And just last week, the NGO Burma Campaign UK named Facebook as one of 49 companies on a 'dirty list', for allowing the incitement of hatred and violence of minorities, in particular the Rohingya Muslim minority and Muslims in general.
"Although it has belatedly closed down accounts run by the Burmese military, it continues to host the page of the Information Committee, formerly State Counsellor Information Committee, which is run from Aung San Suu Kyi’s office," says the group.
"Since 2016 this was one of the main official government/military pages on Facebook used for inciting fear and hatred of the Rohingya, including the notorious ‘Fake Rape’ poster denying that independently verified claims of rape of Rohingya women by the Burmese military are true."
The group says it will continue to press for more accounts to be removed.
