Facebook has faced a huge amount of backlash over their inability to regulate the content that’s being uploaded to their website, however, what has taken place lately is arguably one of the most disturbing occurrences that has taken place on the social media platform.
As for what took place, Reuters reported that last month, men in South Sudan started a bidding war over a 17-year-old girl after they saw her marriage advertised on the website. Specifically, the men engaged in the competitive sale just a few days after the post circulated on the site, eventually, the girl was purchased by a wealthy businessman. This has, of course, cause an outcry of people stating that the company simply doesn’t have the ability to protect its users from what people are able to publish. In fact, in this case, the post was made public on the 25th of October and was only removed by Facebook on the 9th of the next month, days after the girl was said to have been married.
Obviously this is a shocking case, however, it isn’t an isolated case, in fact, in Myanmar, over 700,000 members of the Rohingya community were forced to flee the country while thousands more were killed due to ethnic violence that the UN eventually linked back to racists posts spread on Facebook while in Libya, Facebook has been used by rival militias to spread fake news and hate-filled messages which worked to multiply the violence in the country.
