Jack Dorsey’s Myanmar Mix‑up
Picture this: Twitter’s big boss, Jack Dorsey, strolls into a monastery in Myanmar, gets a few heart‑rate graphs to brag about, and tweets a gloriously upbeat ode to the country’s scenery. No mention at all of the “ethnic cleansing” headline the United Nations has been shouting about ever since the 2017 crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority. And that has everyone from activists to old‑timed journalists raising their eyebrows.
The Humanitarian Backdrop
Over 730,000 Rohingya fled bombed villages and a naval crackdown in Rakhine State in 2017, according to UN agencies. The army’s operation was supposedly a counter‑insurgency against insurgent attacks, but UN‑mandated investigators and Human Rights Watch accuse the military of genocidal intent. Meanwhile, those displaced say they’ve lost families, homes, and countless needed proteins when the state‑backed forces and Christian radicals overrun villages.
Dorsey’s “Meditative” Tweets
- “Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing. I visited Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan. We meditated at several monasteries across the country.”
- Alongside a sketchy photo of a barren room (the monastery’s “zen” meeting place) and a graph of his heart‑rate spikes.
- No shout‑out to the mass killings and violent rapes that, according to witnesses, peppered the region.
The out‑of‑the‑box Critique
Andrew Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch fired back: “I’m no expert on meditation, but is it meant to make you so self‑obsessed you forget that you’re in a place where the military has committed mass killings, rapes, and forced hundreds of thousands to flee a humanitarian disaster?”
Twitter’s Stance (and Silence)
Twitter spokeswoman Kate Hayes declined to comment on the criticism, and the platform set in motion its hateful‑conduct policy to weed out accounts that insult groups based on race or ethnicity. The company deleted several tweets flagged after a Reuters August report exposed a wave of propaganda accounts that label Rohingya as illegal immigrants or “Bengalis.”
Yet, new accounts would pop up over the summer of 2017, firing off retweets that aimed to spin the Rohingya as outsiders. Those messages, aimed at swatting back Western media coverage, have lingered online even a year later.
Other Zany Incidents
Just a month earlier, Dorsey stirred up a storm in India: a photo of him on a placard screaming “smash Brahminical patriarchy” went viral, and Twitter issued an apology. So it seems Dorsey’s got a knack for both the good and the “oh‑no‑this‑might‑be‑bad” moments.
