Report: Facebook approved eight paid ads submitted by rights group Global Witness containing hate speech and calls for violence against Myanmar's Rohingya
Global Witness has been running this audit campaign for years: in 2021 it found Facebook promoting content inciting violence against Myanmar's coup protesters and amplifying junta misinformation (its study on coup-era content), building on the company's own 2018 commissioned report that conceded the platform wasn't doing enough to prevent offline violence (Facebook's commissioned Myanmar report).
The new finding shifts the target from organic content to paid distribution: eight ads submitted by the rights group itself cleared Facebook's ad-review system despite containing hate speech and calls for violence against the Rohingya — the same group U.N. investigators linked to Facebook's spread of hate speech back in 2018 (U.N. experts' genocide inquiry).
First-order effects
Facebook's paid-ads moderation pipeline is directly implicated: revenue-generating content with explicit calls to violence passed review, meaning the failure sits in the commercial ad system, not just user-generated feeds.
Global Witness gains a concrete, reproducible exhibit — submitted ads with known content and approval outcomes — strengthening its case that Facebook's post-2018 Myanmar commitments have not held.
Second-order effects
Advertisers and brand-safety buyers face renewed questions about what their spend can appear alongside, pressuring Facebook's ad-integrity assurances at exactly the moment its video-first feed redesign raises new moderation surface area.
Other rights groups and researchers can replicate the paid-ad audit method, turning one-off exposés into a standing testing regime that Facebook must continuously defend against.
Third-order effects
If ad systems keep failing audits this basic, scrutiny will move from organic-content moderation rules to the ad-review infrastructure itself — with regulators increasingly treating paid political and hate content as a distinct enforcement problem rather than a subset of community standards.
The trend: Five years after the Rohingya crisis first exposed Facebook's Myanmar moderation gaps, independent audits keep finding the same failure modes, shifting the debate from whether Facebook moderates enough to whether its ad and ranking systems can be trusted at all.
Today @StateDept formally announced that violence perpetrated by Myanmar's military against the #Rohingya constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity. This should bring renewed attention to the role of Facebook @meta in fuelling the #Rohingya genocide. 1/6
NEW🔴 After admitting their role in spreading hate during the Rohingya genocide in #Myanmar, Facebook (@Meta) said it's got better at detecting Burmese hate speech. Yet our new #GWTech investigation shows it's still incapable of detecting hateful content: https://www.globalwitness…
Investigation by @Global_Witness out today reveals how #Facebook/@Meta is still very much open for business when it comes to accepting paid ads propagating hatred against #Rohingya in #Myanmar. https://www.globalwitness.org/ ...
Today Facebook is due to respond. Will @LeoVaradkar and lawmakers worldwide stand with the Rohingya when considering Big Tech regulation? https://twitter.com/...
“It is reasonable to assume that Facebook would apply its hate speech detection systems to ads as well as to organic content given that the company says explicitly that ads violating its community standards (which include hate speech) are prohibited.” https://www.globalwitness.or…
That's right. And I warned you every day, @Meta. I talked to their condescending “product” assholes and in every meeting with them I begged them to look at what they were doing to Myanmar. They knew. https://twitter.com/...
Let's never forget how the UN found Facebook played a “determining role” in the Rohingya genocide through the spread of fake news and misinformation in Myanmar. https://twitter.com/...
VW engineers were held accountable for following management's orders to build emission-dodging tech. Where's the line for Facebook/Meta engineers and management knowingly ignoring and abetting human rights abuse and slaughter? https://twitter.com/...
This negligence is unacceptable. I saw this behavior over and over from Facebook - it ultimately led me to become a #whistleblower. @meta chronically underfunds and understaffs the teams responsible for keeping us safe — especially in the most vulnerable places in the world. 3/6
How did the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign against Facebook get so many companies to sign on - and what did Mark Zuckerberg have to say about it? CEO of the @ADL and author of “It Could Happen Here” @JGreenblattADL talks the rise of hate in America now on [link to Andrew Yang's …
Despite @Meta's promises to do better, Facebook's leaky controls still fail to detect hate speech and calls for violence on its platform. https://apnews.com/...
The use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya in #Myanmar has been reported by the @UN & our latest investigation reveals how @Meta hasn't done enough to contain it. Mohammed Farbes, member of the Rohingya Student Network, explains how this affects his community …
It has been 5 years of promises from @meta to “do more” and “do better.” So, are they? No. @Global_Witness had 8 ads with explicit hate speech about #Rohingya approved for publication. 👎👎👎AP News: https://apnews.com/... 2/6