The military threw major resources at the task, the people said, with as many as 700 people on it. The Myanmar military’s Facebook operation began several years ago, said the people familiar with how it worked. The information committee of Myanmar’s military did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “Investigations into this type of activity are ongoing.” “We have taken significant steps to remove this abuse and make it harder on Facebook,” Mr. By then, more than 700,000 Rohingya had fled the country in a year, in what United Nations officials called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The company has said it is bolstering its efforts to stop such abuses. In August, after months of reports about anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook, the company acknowledged that it had been too slow to act in Myanmar. “I wouldn’t say Facebook is directly involved in the ethnic cleansing, but there is a responsibility they had to take proper actions to avoid becoming an instigator of genocide.” “The military has gotten a lot of benefit from Facebook,” said Thet Swe Win, founder of Synergy, a group that focuses on fostering social harmony in Myanmar. The campaign, described by five people who asked for anonymity because they feared for their safety, included hundreds of military personnel who created troll accounts and news and celebrity pages on Facebook and then flooded them with incendiary comments and posts timed for peak viewership. While Facebook took down the official accounts of senior Myanmar military leaders in August, the breadth and details of the propaganda campaign - which was hidden behind fake names and sham accounts - went undetected. Human rights groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history. The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Members of the Myanmar military were the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that stretched back half a decade and that targeted the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, the people said. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers and civilian officials in the country. The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Another shared a false story about the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man. One said Islam was a global threat to Buddhism. NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar - They posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes as they flooded Facebook with their hatred.
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