Twitter's Jack Dorsey Wants You to Go to Myanmar, Where Social Media Is Helping Drive a Genocide

Luke Darby
Updated
Countries with on-going ethnic cleansing may not be the best vacation spots.

Starting in late November, Jack Dorsey took a break from Twitter. It's maybe not the best P.R. that for his birthday, he himself to vacation from the same social media giant where he's CEO, but it seems like a safe bet that Dorsey isn't too concerned about optics in general.

He was on a silent retreat in Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country that's made headlines across the globe in the last few years for its monstrous treatment of its minority Rohingya Muslims. The military is accused of displacing more than 700,000 people, destroying homes and villages, and adding to the world refugee crisis, all on top of a damning U.N. investigation. Per the Guardian:

The UN mission found that the military was “killing indiscriminately, gang-raping women, assaulting children and burning entire villages” in Rakhine, home to the Muslim Rohingya, and in Shan and Kachin. The armed forces of Myanmar, known as the Tatmadaw, also carried out murders, imprisonments, enforced disappearances, torture, rapes and used sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence, persecution and enslavement, while in northern Rakhine, the mission also found evidence of mass extermination and deportation.

Online, people were quick to point that the most generous explanation for Dorsey promoting his trip to Myanmar was that he was staggeringly ignorant.

Social media platforms share a special kind of blame for the horrifying violence in Myanmar. Facebook in particular has been accused of allowing its platform to be used as an anti-Muslim propaganda tool, permitting the spread of hate-speech and calls for genocide.

Social media companies have been loathe to take responsibility for either their corporate practices (like Facebook's investigation of a wealthy critic) or for the real-world impact of their platforms (like Tumblr's overly broad porn ban), but Dorsey is projecting a whole new level of obliviousness here. Twitter is still struggling with how to handle Nazis and white supremacists on its site (at least in countries where it's not legally required to block them), so one would assume that the company's executives might more cognizant of literal ethnic cleansing.