Illustrations: Erik Carter

The Risk Makers

Viral hate, election interference, and hacked accounts: inside the tech industry’s decades-long failure to reckon with risk

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly
OneZero
Published in
35 min readSep 21, 2020

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OOne spring day in 2014, Susan Benesch arrived at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park and was ushered into a glass-walled conference room. She’d traveled from Washington, D.C., to meet with Facebook’s Compassion Research Team, a group that included employees, academics, and researchers whose job was to build tools to help users resolve conflicts directly, reducing Facebook’s need to intervene.

Benesch, a human rights lawyer, faculty associate at Harvard, and founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit studying the connection between online speech and real-world violence, worked closely with the Compassion Research Team, and used this meeting to raise a serious issue that had come to her attention: The extensive sectarian violence in Myanmar.

Long before it was headline news, human rights groups were warning that the Burmese military and a segment of the population were orchestrating widescale abuses against civilians, particularly the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority: forced labor, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, the burning of villages. The attacks, amply documented but denied by the Myanmar government, were being coordinated online and…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly
Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly

Written by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly are award-winning writers and frequent collaborators. Follow their work on Twitter: @ckbuni and @schemaly.

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