Rohingya people

• The steep hillsides also house half a million refugee children with dreams that extend far beyond the confines of the camp.
• Despite the grim backdrop of a childhood marked by crises faced by so many Rohingya children in Myanmar, Jannat is continuing her education today.
• It is also providing a mechanism to align additional funding and scale-up the education in emergency response in Bangladesh.
• To date, ECW has invested a total of $31 million in Bangladesh and has already reached nearly 310,000 crisis-affected children and youth.

• In the United States, 41 states have filed lawsuits against Meta for allegedly driving social media addiction in its young users (under the age of 18), amid growing concerns about the negative effects of platforms.
• The lawsuits allege Meta has been harvesting young users’ data, deploying features to promote compulsive use of both Facebook and Instagram, and misleading the public about the negative effects of these features.

Leveraging whistleblower revelations

• These cases rely in part on revelations made by former Meta employee Frances Haugen in 2021 about the role Facebook’s algorithms play in facilitating harms on the platform.
• Haugen’s testimony suggests algorithms deployed across Facebook and Instagram were designed to increase content sharing, and therefore profits, using data harvested from users over many years.
• These changes, she said, impacted how content was viewed on the news feed, leading to increased sharing of negative content such as hate speech.

Concerns over algorithms and content

• Instead it provides a continuous stream of content without a natural endpoint.
• They say the recommendation algorithms used by Meta periodically present users with harmful materials.
• These include “content related to eating disorders, violent content, content encouraging negative self-perception and body image issues, [and] bullying content”.

Consequences for Australia

• This includes material relating to cyberbullying of children, cyberabuse of adults, image-based abuse and abhorrent violent material.
• The Federal Court can impose significant penalties for violations of the Online Safety Act.
• But this doesn’t cover all the harmful content on social media, such as some linked to eating disorders and negative self-image.
• Australia also has no legislative equivalent to COPPA.

We need collaboration and innovation

• But domestic law can only go so far in protecting people using a medium that operates (mostly) seamlessly across borders.
• As such, international law scholars have suggested more creative approaches in the context of online hate speech.
• In doing so, the court strengthened The Gambia’s claims in a pending action before the International Court of Justice.

• Kayleen Manwaring receives funding from the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation and the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre.
• She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Consumer Policy Research Centre (Vic) and is Deputy Chair and NSW Coordinator for an Australian chapter of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.

• This came a week after the junta moved her into house arrest following a year in solitary confinement.
• But it still leaves Aung San Suu Kyi facing a 27-year jail term on bogus charges.
• The junta also lopped four years off former president Win Myint’s sentence, and reportedly released more than 7,000 other prisoners.

Determined resistance

• Under these volatile conditions, people have been voting with their feet by fleeing abroad or taking up arms in a revolutionary mobilisation.
• The junta’s leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, reportedly told the National Defence and Security Council that elections couldn’t be conducted due to continued fighting in several regions.
• While aerial bombardments by regime aircraft might set back the resistance, the strategy is hardly a way to win hearts or minds.
• Diplomatic efforts to maintain Myanmar’s territorial integrity jostle with the discomfort felt almost everywhere about doing business with a blood-splattered regime.

An unnecessary crisis

• It’s a precipitous erosion of what was, until the coup, a relatively positive story for most Myanmar people.
• Before the coup, the most problematic issue was the military’s abuses of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority living in westernmost Myanmar.
• That political and social infrastructure, and the emerging civil society it helped sustain, has now crumbled.
• Some speculate the whole system will collapse, making it impossible for powerbrokers to keep up the increasingly flimsy charade of state power.

No way out

• But it does reveal the fragility of the military system and the paranoia of the men in charge.
• It’s also further evidence that nobody can trust the junta.
• Still, there’s no obvious path to fuller inclusion in ASEAN while the generals unleash such violence against their own people.