Twitter CEO “@Jack” Wants You to Visit Myanmar – Social Media Assists Genocide

(The AEGIS Alliance) – Jack Dorsey started taking a break from twitter in late November. Although it might not look good for Press Release (P.R.), he went on vacation for his birthday from the same social platform giant that he is CEO at. It’s safe to say that Dorsey doesn’t have concerns about optics in general.

Jack took a silent retreat into Myanmar. The majority of Myanmar is a Buddhist country. There have been headlines around the world over the past few years about its horrible treatment of its minority population Rohingya Muslims. There have been accusations against its military for displacing over 700,000 people, and also destroying villages and homes. It has also added to the world refugee crisis. There was even a damning U.N. investigation.

According to 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.”

Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing. I visited the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan. We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country. pic.twitter.com/wMp3cmkfwi

— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018

People on Twitter and online jumped at the chance to quickly point out that the most obvious explanation for Dorsey promoting his Myanmar trip was that he is quite ignorant. There was quite the backlash against Dorsey.

I’m not sure if there’s a level of ignorance—even reckless willful ignorance—that could explain this? Is there literally nobody at Twitter or within Jack’s “people” that could point out tourism in Myanmar is morally questionable rn, ESPECIALLY if you run a social platform?

— Emma Beals (@ejbeals) December 9, 2018

Social Media platforms hold some blame for the horrifying Myanmar violence. In particular, there are accusations against Facebook that its platform is allowed to be used for anti-Muslim propaganda. Facebook is seen as giving permission for hate-speech and calls to commit genocide.

I’ve interviewed dozens of #Rohingya #refugees who shared horrific details of atrocities committed against them by #Myanmar’s military. It was only in Oct that the head of a UN fact finding mission said genocide was ongoing in #Rakhine. This thread left me utterly speechless. https://t.co/j78ttbq5pF

— Mohammed Jamjoom (@MIJamjoom) December 9, 2018

Social media giants loathe to be to responsible for either their real world impact of the platforms, or their corporate practices such as Facebook and Tumblr. However, Dorsey is projecting an entirely new level of being blatantly obvious. Twitter has its own struggles, such as how to deal with White Supremacists and Nazis on its platform. Especially in countries where it is not required by law to block them. People assume that the corporations executives would be more aware of quite literal ethnic cleansing.

Jack Dorsey Photo Credit: CC/Flickr/cellanr

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.