Facebook is amplifying ethnic violence in Myanmar. Should it leave?

Last week, United Nation investigators briefing the press about the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar pointed their fingers at a surprising perpetrator: Facebook. The officials said that hate-filled Facebook posts have helped amplify deadly ethnic tensions in the country, where military strikes since last August have spurred about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh from what the U.N. suspects may be genocide. One of the U.N. investigators said Facebook has “turned into a beast,” alleging that it has been used to incite “a lot of violence and a lot of hatred against the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities” in Myanmar.

As it happened, last week’s guest on the Slate podcast I co-host was Facebook’s news feed chief, Adam Mosseri, so we asked him about Facebook’s role in Myanmar and what responsibility it has to its users there. He was quite candid, even if, as he allowed, Facebook is still working toward finding the right approach to the situation. “Connecting the world isn’t always going to be a good thing,” Mosseri told us, acknowledging that at Facebook, “we lose some sleep over this.”