Last fall, John Oliver ran a piece on Last Week Tonight on HBO about Facebook. The piece covered how Myanmar uses Facebook to get the majority of their information, even citing that they use the word internet and Facebook interchangeably. While it is good that the people of Myanmar have access to the internet and the rest of the world, it is leading to problems inside of the country.

Myanmar, a primarily Buddhist country, has extreme tensions with the Rohingya people who are a mostly Muslim group. According to a report from the show, 725,000 Rohingya have already fled to Bangladesh. But out of the people stuck in Myanmar, conservatively 10,000 people have died as a result of the government and people there. John Oliver did say Facebook did not cause the deaths in Myanmar, but Facebook did help stoke the fire between the conflict. A report by independent UN investigators stated, “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate,” which John Oliver says is comparable to a UN report saying bubble tea is an aggressive threat to human rights. “Honestly I’ve never really liked it but Jesus Christ” joked Oliver.

Oliver goes on to blast Facebook for their apparent lack of care on what’s going on in Myanmar and called the site “a feted swamp of mistruths and outright lies interspersed with the occasional reminder of a dead pet.” While he’s not wrong about Facebook in the context of Myanmar, saying they do nothing good is not quite correct.

There are multiple case studies of how Facebook has been instrumental in revolutions and organizing people. Just look at the case studies of the Arab Spring or Ukraine and Euromaidan. Because of the freedom and accessibility of Facebook, it has allowed people who have been suppressed to mobilize and overthrow tyrannical governments. But at the same time, the government has the same access and they can use this tool for evil, like Myanmar.

Facebook is at cross-roads, they have entered a gray area where they need to find a way to filter out hate speech yet not violate freedom of speech. Currently, Facebook is trying to hire more Burmese people to filter out the hate speech, but this problem is also bigger than Facebook. Myanmar is still new to the internet realm and don’t quite realize how vast the internet really is. In my opinion, these are growing pains of the transition of Myanmar to the rest of the world. Facebook has found themselves at the center of this and at the end of the day, they can’t be passive about this situation.