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A War of Words Puts Facebook at the Center of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis
Myanmar’s government has barred Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk, from public preaching for the past year, saying his speeches helped fuel the violence against the country’s Rohingya ethnic group that the United Nations calls ethnic cleansing.
So he has turned to an even more powerful and ubiquitous platform to get his message out — Facebook.
Every day he posts updates, often containing false information, that spread a narrative of the Rohingya as aggressive outsiders.
And posts like these have put Facebook at the center of a fierce information war that is…