The Sri Lankan government accused Facebook of failing to act swiftly to curb hate speech by Sinhala Buddhist extremists on the social media platform, which it says stoked anti-Muslim riots on the island last week.
Harin Fernando, Sri Lanka’s telecommunications minister, said “this whole country could have been burning in hours”.
Speaking to the Guardian, he added that “hate speech is not being controlled by these organisations and it has become a critical issue globally”. “
Facebook is not reacting as fast as we have wanted it to react. In the past it has taken various number of days to review [flagged posts] or even to take down the pages.”
In particular he highlighted one Sinhala language post which read, “Kill all Muslims, don’t even let an infant of the dogs escape”. A user claimed he reported the post to Facebook, who replied six days later saying it had not broken any guidelines
Facebook responding by stating that “we have increased our local language capabilities [and] established communications with government and non-governmental organisations to support efforts to identify and remove such content”.
See more from the Guardian here.
