On Sunday’s edition of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver devoted his signature extended rant to Facebook’s international expansionand, more specifically, some of the many ways the social network has screwed up on the path to global domination.In the nearly 20-minute segment (which, as always, features strong language, so wear headphones if you’re watching this at work), Oliver says that “for years, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg pushed his utopian idea that all connections are good connections with feel-good ads,” and then shares clips from those ads. “Unfortunately, thinking things through has never really been Facebook’s strong point,” he continues, before drilling down on what he calls the company’s “hugely consequential mistakes” in foreign countries.”For the worst distillation of what Facebook can do to a country,” he says, “just look at Myanmar.” Oliver details the country’s “long history of religious and ethic tensions” and the military’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, which has caused an estimated 725,000 of them to flee to Bangladesh and a “conservative” death toll of 10,000. “By all accounts,” Oliver statesciting various news reports and a U.N. study”Facebook absolutely did inflame preexisting tensions there” and was woefully ill-prepared to deal with the rise of hate speech on its platform Myanmar.
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Source: Ad Age – News
