In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.
Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.
It might be easier than you think to learn to read them. I learnt to read a foreign alphabet and compared to the actual language learning part you would be surprised how fast relatively our brains can adapt to new patterns (I’m still a slow reader in the second language I’m learning, but the beauty of reading is that you can take it at your own pace). Even if you don’t learn the language, you could have a new cool ability to write English words out in a different script :)
Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.