A $150 billion lawsuit over genocide may force Facebook to confront its dark side (WGBH)

Facebook is being sued for facilitating the Rohingya genocide in Burma.

How much of a financial hit would it take to force Mark Zuckerberg sit up and pay attention?

We can be reasonably sure he didn’t lose any sleep when British authorities fined Facebook a paltry $70 million earlier this fall for withholding information about its acquisition of Giphy, an app for creating and hosting animated graphics. Maybe he stirred a bit in July 2019, when the Federal Trade Commission whacked the company with a $5 billion penalty for violating its users’ privacy — a punishment described by the FTC as “the largest ever imposed” in such a case. But then he probably rolled over and caught a few more z’s.

OK, how about $150 billion? Would that do it?

We may be about to find out. Because that’s the price tag lawyers for Rohingya refugees placed on a class-action lawsuit they filed in California last week against Facebook — excuse me, make that Meta Platforms. As reported by Kelvin Chan of The Associated Press, the suit claims that Facebook’s actions in Myanmar stirred up violence in a way that “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.”

Even by Zuckerberg’s standards, $150 billion is a lot of money. Facebook’s revenues in 2020 were just a shade under $86 billion. And though the pricetags lawyers affix on lawsuits should always be taken with several large shakers of salt, the case over genocide in Myanmar could be just the first step in holding Facebook to account for the way its algorithms amplify hate speech and disinformation.

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This effort is being carried out in multiple countries against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg personally.

In the case in California, to get around the problem of the I Amendment and Supreme Court cases saying hate speech can only be prosecuted if it incites imminent lawless action and to get around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the case is being brought as a commerce action alleging Facebook is a fundamentally defective product. The reasoning is its algorithms deliver more and extreme content when searching on particular subjects, as revealed by Facebook’s whistleblower to the SEC and Congress with internal documents from the company.