SEC Whistleblower Complaint Aims to Hold Meta Accountable for Fomenting Ethnic Violence

Senior Leaders at the Open Society Justice Initiative have published an article detailing our joint efforts to persuade the SEC to hold Meta legally accountable for its role in fomenting the 2017 Rohingya genocide and misleading investors about its conduct.

Senior Legal Counsel Beini Yi and Executive Director James Goldstone write:

“But the question of responsibility for what happened to the Rohingya in 2017 extends beyond the crimes directly carried out by the military: it must include those responsible for accelerating and magnifying the wave of public hatred and incitement to violence launched online against the Rohingya both before and during the military atrocities.”

“A significant portion of this material was transmitted on Facebook, then and now the dominant social media platform in Myanmar (Facebook has around 18 million users out of around 24 million total internet users in the country today). A report by the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found in 2018 that at the time of the atrocities in 2017, Facebook was synonymous with the internet and, with that, the main source for online news and information.”

Yi and Goldstone explain that our whistleblower complaint details how “Meta misrepresented its role in the attacks against the Rohingya to its shareholders in statements made between 2015 and 2017. Even though Meta was warned on numerous occasions by civil society actors about the way Facebook was fueling hate in an already volatile environment, they either did not present the full truth or at times lied outright to their investors.”

You can read Amnesty International’s media advisory here, and the full complaint is here.

If you have original information demonstrating a public company’s violations of the securities laws, you can contact us confidentially by email (inquiry@kevingalbraithlaw.com) or by phone (212.203.1249).