I don’t want to suggest that this is neocolonialism, but I think that Facebook uses small countries like laboratories. That is what I saw in Cambodia. At the end of 2017, Facebook put in place the “Explorer feed” functionality in Cambodia and in five other countries of moderate importance, such as Nicaragua, Slovenia and Sri Lanka. This functionality relegated all information of public interest to a space that was very difficult to reach. All you could find were comments about what a friend had eaten, or kitten videos.
All of the public interest information, which is fundamental in that type of country where the news media are repressed and where social media should play a role in disseminating information, had been relegated to a space that was practically unreachable. So a lot of NGOs, such as ours, took Facebook to task for this. After a few months, given the outcry, the social media platform finally removed that functionality.
What the Burmese example tells us is that Facebook was guilty of extreme negligence at the very least. Our correspondent in Myanmar explained that he had contacted one of the few people entrusted, not with monitoring, as you said, but moderating the social network. My correspondent contacted him, and in fact he is pro-government.