Army behind Facebook posts spewing hate speech against Rohingya: UN

Myanmar's military was behind dozens of seemingly unrelated Facebook pages spewing hate speech against the Rohingya prior to its dramatic 2017 crackdown against the mostly Muslim minority, a UN probe found Wednesday.

Facebook has long been accused of helping spread vast amounts of hate speech against the Rohingya before hundreds of thousands of them were driven into neighbouring Bangladesh in a crackdown now subject to a UN genocide investigation.

In late 2021, Rohingya refugees sued Facebook for $150 billion, claiming the social network failed to stem the hate speech directed against them.

Now, the United Nations' Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) says there is clear evidence Myanmar's military secretly orchestrated the hate speech campaign.

The military had in a "systematic and coordinated" manner "spread material designed to instil fear and hatred of the Rohingya minority", the investigators said in a fresh report.

"It accomplished this by creating a clandestine network of pages on a social media site with the potential to reach an audience of millions."