Facebook’s experimental hate-speech policy seems to be working
Wearing a plastic face shield and his orange monastic robes, Ashin Wirathu walked into a Yangon police station on November 2 after more than a year on the run. Until he went into hiding in June of last year, Wirathu, a nationalist preacher with links to the Tatmadaw — the Burmese military — was one of Myanmar’s most prominent Islamophobes, spreading bigotry and disinformation online. In May 2019, he was charged with sedition, but he never showed up for his court date.
Wirathu’s surrender came in the final stages of an election campaign that once again exposed Myanmar’s racial and religious tensions, three years after a surge in hate speech and nationalist sentiment drove a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.
PETER GUEST
