Mapping Minorities’ Vulnerability to Hate Speech ‘maggots’, and ‘rapists’, revealing that the social media giant continued to struggle with content moderation, heavily relying on its users who report posts including hate speech, mainly because its automated systems struggle to interpret Burmese texts. 82 One year later in its subsequently adopted Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, the Mission acknowledged that Facebook banned dangerous organisations (the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, Kachin Independence Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army) from the platform, as well as all related praise and support. 83 Indeed, this constituted a milestone in addressing the escalation of violence against the Rohingyas fuelled by hate speech online. VI HATE SPEECH AGAINST MINORITIES IN THE STATE OF ASSAM, INDIA: LESSONS IGNORED A regional parallel may be drawn between the mass disenfranchisement of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and another unfolding statelessness crisis in the State of Assam, India. This situation has developed since August 2019, when the Indian government published its final list of citizens in the north-eastern Indian State of Assam — stripping nearly 2 million people of Muslim origin of their Indian citizenship, an event noted by the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues in their recent report on minorities affected by statelessness. 84 On 31 August 2019 India published the final version of a list of citizens — the National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) — which was updated for the first time since its creation in 1951 and stripped approximately 1.9 million people of their Indian citizenship in the north-eastern Indian State of Assam. 85 The NRC was created to determine who was born in Assam and is therefore Indian and who might be a migrant from neighbouring Bangladesh, constituting a list of those who can prove they came to the state by 24 March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. 86 The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’) considered this act as a legal way of eliminating ‘infiltrators’ from the country — mainly illegal immigrants from bordering Bangladesh, many believed to be from the Bengali-speaking minority. 87 It may be the case that the Hindu-nationalist government wants to make Assam a ‘test case’ for Hindu primacy in India by expelling ‘illegal’ Muslim migrants who they see as ‘infiltrators’, which was one of the electoral issues addressed prior to elections by the government. Families living in the State of Assam have been required to 82 83 84 85 86 87 Hatebook (n 9). Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, UN Doc A/HRC/42/CRP.5 (16 September 2019) 86–87 [272]. See also ‘Banning More Dangerous Organizations from Facebook in Myanmar’, Facebook (Web Page, 5 February 2019) <https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/02/dangerous-organizations-in-myanmar/>. Minority Issues Report (n 30) 13 [86]. Christoph Sperfeldt and Amelia Walters, ‘A Crisis of Citizenship in India is Risking Mass Statelessness’, Pursuit (online, 5 September 2019) <https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/acrisis-of-citizenship-in-india-is-risking-mass-statelessness>. More precisely, this deadline indicates the day before the beginning of the Bangladesh Liberation War, when what was then East Pakistan declared independence from West Pakistan. As a result of the war, an estimated 10 million refugees from the newly formed People's Republic of Bangladesh fled to India whose descendants live there today. See Rajini Vaidyanathan, ‘Assam NRC: What Next For 1.9 Million “Stateless” Indians?’, BBC (online, 31 August 2019) <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49520593>. ibid. 19