News Investigation

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)

In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.

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CITATION

Taub, Amanda, and Max Fisher. "Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match." The New York Times, April 21, 2018. Syndicated via New York Times News Service: https://www.wral.com/17502035/

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