Facebook is conducting a human rights audit in Myanmar to assess its role in enabling ethnic violence and hate speech against its Rohingya Muslim minority... The audit... is a first of its kind for Facebook and appears to be the most aggressive step the company has taken to examine the role of Facebook and WhatsApp in Myanmar, where it has been accused of supercharging the spread of virulent hate speech that the U.N. has linked to ethnic cleansing... Victoire Rio, one of the activists who'd called for such an audit earlier this year, welcomed the move but said it was unclear just how much — if any — of the audit Facebook will make public... But concerns remain. Facebook still doesn’t have any permanent employees in Myanmar, and activists worry the company is relying too heavily on them to highlight problem posts... In a personal letter to activists in Myanmar, Zuckerberg promised to commit more resources to address the issue. Along with conducting the audit, Facebook is banning hate accounts, creating new positions on its policy team to deal specifically with Myanmar, and working with local media outlets to increase news literacy in the country. 

... Facebook has also rolled out a more aggressive approach to taking down hate figures, beginning almost immediately after the company’s meeting with activists in Yangon in early June, banning a number of the most virulent individuals and groups. “We have proactively removed several hate figures and organizations,” Caragliano [a content policy manager] said. “These are not allowed to have a presence on Facebook — they can't have pages, accounts, and we remove content that praises or supports these individuals or organizations.”