A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality; The New York Times, April 17, 2026

M. GESSEN, The New York Times; A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality 

"At the conference I met Rebecca Hamilton, a cheerful war-crimes lawyer who is now a law professor at American University in Washington. Corporate complicity is her area of study. In a 2022 law review article titled “Platform-Enabled Crimes,” she wrote that Facebook (now Meta) could have acted to help prevent the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017 but that it had chosen not to. The decision not to act, Hamilton wrote, had been driven by both the profit motive and a lack of interest in local context. Now Hamilton is working on a book on corporate enablers of atrocity crime. “Securing profit isn’t some abstraction achieved in pristine boardrooms in capital cities,” she wrote in an email to me on Monday after the Lafarge verdict, which had made her, too, very happy. “It is a process that plays out in real locations, with real people, including those living through conflict.”"

Meta’s Decision to End Fact-Checking Could Have Disastrous Consequences; The New York Times, January 14, 2025

 Sarah Chatta, The New York Times; Meta’s Decision to End Fact-Checking Could Have Disastrous Consequences

"What happens on Meta’s platforms is more than just a matter of company policy. The prevalence of false information on social media and the ease with which it can proliferate have helped fuel division and violence in the United States and abroad. The company’s addictive algorithms were so effective in supercharging posts encouraging ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that Amnesty International called upon Meta to pay reparations to the Rohingya people. (The company said “we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate on Facebook” in Myanmar, and eventually took steps to proactively identify and remove posts.)

I first learned the importance of fact-checking while working as a reporter in Sri Lanka in 2018, when an episode of violence tied to Meta’s platforms rocked the country."

Myanmar’s Assault on a Truthful Press; The New York Times, September 16, 2018

 Stephen J. Adler, The New York Times; Myanmar’s Assault on a Truthful Press

"Mr. Adler, the president and editor in chief of Reuters, sits on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists."

"With the world’s nations preparing for the opening this week of the United Nations General Assembly, it is time to affirm not only the facts of this case but the value of facts themselves — to declare our certainty that some things are true and others are not. We must reject the cynical and dangerous idea that everyone is entitled to their own facts. We can see where this has gotten us in Myanmar and elsewhere. And we need to reaffirm the essential role of a free press in uncovering facts.

Journalists, being people, are imperfect. But journalism, done right, serves a high public purpose. It produces transparency in markets, holds governments and businesses to account, gives people tools to make well-informed decisions, uncovers wrongdoing, inspires reforms, and tells true and remarkable stories that move and inspire. The United Nations must insist that the suppression of a free press contradicts the very nature of democracy and cannot be tolerated. And other multinational institutions, alongside governments, should make it forcefully clear to Myanmar’s leaders that Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo must be freed."