FACEBOOK'S *TOO SLOW* FAIR-STALLS

FILE PHOTO: Ten Rohingya Muslim men with their hands bound kneel
as members of the Myanmar security forces stand guard in Inn Din village.

FACEBOOK says it was 'too slow' to fight hate speech in Myanmar and is acting to remedy the problem by hiring more Burmese speakers and investing in -

Technology to identify problematic content, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The acknowledgement came a day after a Reuters investigations showed why the company has failed  to stem a wave of vitriolic posts about the minority Rohingya.

Some 700,000 Rohingya fled their homes last year after an army crackdown that the United States  denounced as ethnic cleansing.

The Rohingya now live in teeming refugee camps in Bangladesh.

''The ethnic cleansing in Myanmar is horrific and we've been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate speech on Facebook,'' Facebook said.

The Reuters story revealed the social media giant for years dedicated scant resources to combating hate speech in Myanmar, which is a market it dominates and where there have been eruptions of ethnic violence.

In early 2015, for instance, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese monitoring problematic posts.

In Thursday's statement, posted online, Facebook said it was using tools to automatically detect  hate speech  and hiring more Burmese-Language speakers to review posts, following up on a pledge made by founder Mark Zuckerberg to US senators in April.

The company said it had over 60 ''Myanmar language experts'' in June and plans to have at least 100  by the end of the year.

Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of  posts, comments, images and videos denigrating  and attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims that were on the social media  platform as of  last week.

Some of the material, which included pornographic anti-Muslim images, has been up on Facebook for as long as six years. [Agencies]