We already know, just from the company’s behavior in the United States, that Facebook seems content to continue to permit the spread of extremist disinformation and organizing on its social media platform, while paying lip service to its responsibilities and taking hollow half-measures to correct the problem—largely because its revenue stream is so powerfully dependent on the features fueling the phenomenon. Facebook’s profits, as whistleblower-provided evidence has established, are fundamentally built on creating social division and real-world strife. The apotheosis of Facebook-fueled violence is genocide; its undeniable role in helping facilitate the bloody eliminationist campaign by Myanmar’s military against its Rohingya minority population is already well-established. Now, a fresh report from Nick Robins-Early of Vice details how it is replicating those results in Ethiopia, where military leaders and their authoritarian supporters are unleashing genocidal violence in the midst of an ongoing civil war. Read more