A judge within the us has ordered Facebook to release records of now-closed accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar, consistent with the Wall Street Journal.
The judge in Washington, DC, criticised Facebook for failing handy over information to investigators seeking to prosecute the country for international crimes against the Muslim minority Rohingya, the newspaper said.
Facebook had refused to release the info , saying it might violate a US law that bars transmission services from disclosing users’ communications.
But the judge said the posts, which were deleted, wouldn’t be covered under the law, consistent with the Wall Street Journal.The Reuters press agency couldn’t immediately access details of the ruling, and Facebook didn’t immediately answer an invitation for comment.
The Gambia is seeking the records as a part of a case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice within the Hague, accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide.
Myanmar authorities say they were battling an armed uprising and deny completing systematic atrocities.
More than 730,000 predominantly Muslim Rohingya fled Myanmar’s western Rakhine state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape.
Rights groups documented killings of civilians and therefore the burning of villages.
Shannon Raj Singh, human rights counsel at Twitter, called the choice “momentous”.
In a post on Twitter, she said it had been “one of the foremost samples of the relevance of social media to modern atrocity prevention & response”.
Facebook has come under attack in Myanmar over the past 10 years – during which the Rohingya are subjected to successive waves of violence – for the quantity of hate speech directed against the community. Investigators from the UN say the platform played a key role in spreading hate speech that fuelled the crackdown in 2017.