Staff Correspondent

Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus on Wednesday urged Meta, which operates several social media and communication platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp, to find an effective way to combat disinformation that disrupts social harmony and spreads hatred.

“This (disinformation) is a big problem. You must find a way to fight it,” said the Chief Adviser. 

Prof Yunus made the comment when Simon Milner, VP, Public Policy, APAC at Meta and Ruzan Sarwar, Public Policy Manager, met him at the State Guest House Jamuna. 

''Bangladesh is a densely populated country. One wrong word can destabilise the whole country. Some people do it deliberately,” said the Chief Adviser.

Milner said they were ready to engage with the interim government of Bangladesh to counter disinformation, especially ahead of the upcoming general election next year, and had had meetings with different Bangladeshi authorities and rights groups in the past few days.

“We have had a dedicated team for Bangladesh for the last five years,” he said.

The Chief Adviser said Meta platforms, especially Facebook, have the potential to promote business growth, but at the same time, they can be potentially dangerous provided they do not maintain ethical standards.

Chief Adviser's Special Assistant on Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, was among others present on the occasion, according to Chief Adviser's press wing.

Taiyeb urged Meta to increase its Bangla language proficiency, as Meta LLM AI is very much dependent on the English language, which is not helpful.

On Tuesday, the Meta officials held a meeting with ICT ministry officials together, where the Bangladesh side, referring to recent researches, urged Meta to increase investment in Bengali LLM & AI based sentiment analysis in Bengali, as well as to increase the number of human reviewers to tackle fake news and information.

The ICT Division has called on Meta to strengthen the enforcement of its community standards in the context of Bangladesh by recruiting more Bangladeshi content reviewers who possess a deeper understanding of local language, culture and sensitivities. 

Besides, the Bangladeshi side has requested Meta to deploy cache servers and edge routers within the country to improve service efficiency, optimise  bandwidth and protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Representatives of Bangladesh Police, BTRC who were present at Tuesday’s meeting, asked Meta to improve the processing time for taking down any harmful posts to protect citizen safety.

The police also asked for Meta’s cooperation in a proactive and faster response in threat detection, crime detection, misinformation/disinformation alert, inciting mob violence alert and suicide alert.