Facebook’s Litmus Test in Cambodia

In January, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen went live on Facebook during a groundbreaking ceremony for a new road and addressed his political opponents. In a veiled reference to a politician convicted of defamation last year, Hun Sen threatened legal action against anyone who said the ruling party had stolen votes. “There are only two options. One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick,” the prime minister said. “Either you face legal action in court, or I rally [the Cambodian] People’s Party people for a demonstration and beat you up.”

Cambodia will hold national elections on July 23, and the prime minister is expected to extend his 38 years in power. Bombastic rhetoric is typical for Hun Sen, who leads a country of 17 million people and has around 14 million Facebook followers. But the January remarks drew immediate attention from both local and international media, and a few users reported the speech for inciting violence. Meta, which owns Facebook, eventually determined that Hun Sen had violated its community standards. But the moderators left the speech online on the grounds it was “newsworthy,” which Facebook defines as when public interest outweighs threat to public safety or risk of harm.

The speech has become a litmus test for Meta, which has pledged to improve its content moderation and understanding of political contexts in Southeast Asia. Nearly six years ago, Facebook’s algorithms contributed to human rights violations during Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya ethnic minority. The company has since released a corporate human rights policy and claims that it has strengthened language capacity and local relationships in the region. However, critics argue that these efforts are more about bolstering Meta’s reputation than accepting responsibility for the platform’s links to violence in these countries.

Meta’s Oversight Board, a group of independent experts that arbitrates content moderation, is now reviewing the Hun Sen case, with a binding decision about the video expected before July. The board will also deliver policy recommendations that could influence how Meta approaches political speech ahead of other upcoming elections in Asia, including in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The decision is unlikely to affect the results of the vote in Cambodia, where the government recently banned the main opposition party from participation. But for people across Asia, it will signal where Meta may draw the line on the issue of political threats and incitement—rhetoric that leaders from Pakistan to the Philippines have embraced.

The crux of the matter rests on Meta’s definition of newsworthiness, which is by its own admission “highly subjective.” Meta grants an exception for newsworthiness in cases where speech may violate other community standards after a “thorough review” by Facebook teams of whether the content creates an immediate safety threat or “gives voice to perspectives currently being debated as part of a political process.” Between June 2021 and June 2022, Facebook moderators justified content with this standard 68 times, with about one-fifth of those allowances given to politicians, according to a Meta transparency center article. (Meta declined to comment through a spokesperson.)

Meta’s internal thinking on the issue remains unclear. “I cannot tell you, ‘Here’s exactly the process,’” said Julie Owono, an Oversight Board member and executive director of Internet Sans Frontières. “We want to make sure users have, if not a precise idea, at least a less vague idea of what happens when content is taken down, or what happens when [they] report something.”

When it comes to incitement on social media, the risk of harm is not theoretical in Southeast Asia. Although Facebook’s vast reach has enabled information-sharing in native languages across the region, it has also amplified hate speech and violence, most notably in Myanmar. In 2018, the company commissioned an independent report about its role in the violence there, admitting it wasn’t “doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” Facebook launched the Oversight Board in 2020 and a corporate human rights policy in 2021, which committed to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, along with other international standards, depending on the circumstances.

Given this stated commitment to human rights, some critics argue that Meta’s newsworthiness exception should be scrapped altogether. The International Commission of Jurists, made up of 60 lawyers and judges around the world, publicly pointed out to the Oversight Board that human rights laws do not contain public interest exceptions, and that there is a distinction between protecting journalists reporting on hate speech and the newsworthiness of the speech itself. Meta’s current allowance “would eviscerate the protection provided by international human rights law against expression inciting violence, hostility or discrimination,” the commission wrote.

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So how dangerous was Hun Sen’s speech in the January clip? Cambodia is relatively stable, especially compared to countries with active conflicts. Hun Sen is surrounded by a longstanding network of elites and has a tightly controlled plan for succession to his son Hun Manet. In May, the government all but ensured its upcoming election victory when it disqualified the country’s strongest opposition group, the Candlelight Party, from competing. In remarks to the Oversight Board when it passed along the Hun Sen case, Meta asked for help with considering speech by leaders “outside of conflict or crisis situations.”

But that framing overlooks how authoritarianism functions in Cambodia, where the government has engaged in a slow strangulation of legitimate political opposition—often through implied threats of violence. In the months before it excluded the Candlelight Party from the July election, Hun Sen’s government forced the closure of independent media outlets, arrested an opposition leader, upheld a defamation conviction against another, and sentenced another to 27 years of house arrest. Since Hun Sen’s January speech, Human Rights Watch has tracked at least seven violent assaults against opposition party members, with several people reportedly beaten with batons; in years past, dissenters have been killed in broad daylight.

Although it’s difficult to prove causation between online incitement and physical violence, “these [kinds of] posts may be understood as a form of violence in and of themselves,” said Barrie Sander, an assistant professor of international justice at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Beyond the worst case of inspiring actual real-world violence, they still have a potential chilling effect on freedom of expression among the group the hate speech or incitement to violence is targeting.”

A similar narrative is playing out in Bangladesh, which will hold national elections next January. For more than a decade, the country’s opposition has been systematically squeezed. “I increasingly think that Bangladesh might eventually be emulating a kind of variant of Cambodia—that is, decimating the opposition through legal and extralegal means,” said Ali Riaz, a distinguished professor at Illinois State University and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. In an April parliamentary session, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called the country’s top newspaper an “enemy of the people” after a journalist was arrested. Hours later, a group forced its way into the newspaper’s office in the capital, Dhaka, and vandalized the reception area.

When such speech originates or spreads on Facebook, the platform’s role hinges on how users perceive the content and what other information is available. In authoritarian countries, Facebook has often filled the vacuum left behind by independent media. The Oversight Board’s decision on Hun Sen could shape how much interpretation is left to individual users in Cambodia. Riaz said he would like to see Meta adopt a uniform policy that keeps inciting content online but also adds disclaimers that it violated community standards. Inflammatory speech “actually reveals the mindset and upcoming strategy of the incumbent,” he said. Meta has taken a similar approach in the past for graphic violence that highlighted human rights abuses.

The impact of a particular post from Hun Sen is difficult to predict, although past examples provide some clues. Facebook initially banned then-U.S. President Donald Trump from its platform for two years after the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. Although supporters still used Facebook to share statements Trump posted elsewhere, a New York Times project found that the ban helped to blunt his influence. When Trump was reinstated on Facebook, Meta said it would use proportional consequences for future violations, such as limiting the visibility of posts or preventing them from being shared. The Oversight Board could suggest a similar approach for Cambodia.

Some governments have lashed out preemptively when facing scrutiny or dissent on Facebook. In 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then Turkey’s prime minister, threatened to ban Facebook as well as YouTube when users shared corruption allegations on those platforms. In Myanmar, the military junta blocked Facebook after carrying out a coup in February 2021; Meta banned the military from its platforms a month later. Cambodia was swift to cut access to independent news sites during the last national election in 2018 and has banned access to independent outlet Voice of Democracy (VOD) since February, but the government has previously said it had “nothing to gain by closing Facebook.”

Regardless of how the Oversight Board rules on Hun Sen’s video, content moderation experts and human right defenders agree that Meta shouldn’t have to navigate political and cultural contexts on a case-by-case basis. Ideally, the company would have developed a thorough understanding of the countries where it is gaining market share, working with native speakers, civil society groups, and content moderation teams with expertise—steps it has started to take in places it long overlooked. Without such investments, Meta risks taking a narrow and reactive approach to human rights that distracts from systemic changes.

Meta says it has made efforts to boost its on-the-ground expertise in Cambodia, writing in a 2021 report that it had nearly tripled moderation resources and was creating partnerships to help Facebook monitor arrests of users for freedom of expression. For people using Facebook in the Khmer language, however, these efforts are no match for the government’s vast presence. Employees across multiple ministries monitor criticism or so-called fake news, while local village and commune chiefs weigh in on their residents’ online behavior. Cambodians who do not self-censor have been arrested for offenses ranging from insulting the king to complaining about layoffs.

Ultimately, Facebook removing content—or even Hun Sen’s profile altogether—would be a Band-Aid, not a panacea. Since Meta’s Oversight Board took on the case, Cambodia’s government has already defended the prime minister’s words as nothing out of the ordinary. In comments to the Khmer Times, a government-aligned newspaper, in April, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that Cambodians “understand that Mr. Hun Sen’s message is not inciting violence or hostility. His message is just only a confirmation of the legal process.”

With opposition members facing physical violence, in jail, or defecting to the ruling party, Hun Sen’s two presented options seem to be less of a threat than a statement of fact. That doesn’t make Meta’s decision less fraught: Its platform remains powerful through its ability to amplify speech, and the Oversight Board’s decision sets an important precedent. But how Hun Sen’s government will treat his political opponents offline—during the upcoming election and beyond—remains up to him alone.