‘We Tried to Warn You’

While reporting on Facebook’s operations in Myanmar in 2018, I wrote about mobs hunting down people in the streets, violent animosity toward a beleaguered minority group, and the targeting of journalists (some of whom were branded as terrorists)—all of which could be traced back to hate-filled misinformation that had rippled across social media unimpeded. At the time, a Facebook employee, an American diplomat, and several others who had spent time in Myanmar (also known as Burma) told me they worried that similar trends were under way in the United States.

In the U.S. itself, however, that concern was rarely replicated. The link between online lies and real-world violence was present not just in Myanmar, but in India, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere—places where American technology platforms, particularly Facebook, were used to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and barrage users with propaganda. In those countries, civil-society members, activists, and concerned citizens