New Delhi, Delhi, India
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been in Myanmar, where he has meditated — tracked on his Apple watch whether that made him calmer and therefore sleep better — met monks and nuns, and of course tweeted about virtually everything under the Myanmar sun.
That is everything but the Rohingya exodus.
More than 7000,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since August 2017 following a crackdown on them by the Myanmar army and security forces. The Rohingya live in Myanmar's western state of Rakhine. They are Muslim unlike the country's Buddhist majority which considers them to be "Bengali" (Bangladeshi).
Most of the Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.
"Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing. I visited the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan. We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country," Dorsey tweeted.
"The highlight of my trip was serving monks and nuns food, and donating sandals and umbrellas. This group of young nuns in Mandalay and their chanting was breathtaking and chilling," he added.
Dorsey went on to talk about being bitten my mosquitoes, and the link between his meditating, his heart rate, and his sleeping.
Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing. I visited the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan. We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country. pic.twitter.com/wMp3cmkfwi
— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018
The highlight of my trip was serving monks and nuns food, and donating sandals and umbrellas. This group of young nuns in Mandalay and their chanting was breathtaking and chilling. pic.twitter.com/E2nHFOsHu2
— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018
We also meditated in a cave in Mandalay one evening. In the first 10 minutes I got bit 117 times by mosquitoes ? They left me alone when the light blew a fuse, which you can see in my heart rate lowering. pic.twitter.com/rz59Wx9yHF
— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018
I also wore my Apple Watch and Oura ring, both in airplane mode. My best meditations always had the least variation in heart rate. When I wasn’t focused, it would jump around a lot. Here’s a night of sleep on the 10th night (my resting heart rate was consistently below 40). pic.twitter.com/9fiz8s8DR5
— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018
He was met with a barrage of criticism.
"I'm no expert on meditation, but is it supposed to make you so self-obsessed that you forget to mention you're in a country where the military has committed mass killings & mass rape, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee, in one of today's biggest humanitarian disasters?," the European media director of Human Rights Watch Andrew Stroehlein tweeted.
#Rohingya are literally being exterminated by #Myanmar authorities, social media are helping amplifying the genocide and meanwhile, Jack Dorsey proudly tweets about the amazing silent retreat he did in Myanmar on his birthday. It speaks volume (pun intended). https://t.co/FXm0gP79h6
— Rim-Sarah Alouane (@RimSarah) December 9, 2018
.@Jack is recommending Myanmar as a hip cool tourist destination at the same time as hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya Muslim minority have been forced to flee the country (to Bangaldesh & elsewhere) due to persecution, violence, rape, murder, & attempted genocide. https://t.co/MSLujiJTYW
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) December 9, 2018
This guy. Jack Dorsey went to enjoy a meditation trip in Myanmar . No wonder Twitter has only 250 million people. pic.twitter.com/qPqDZpkOzw
— Gharib Tommy (@gharib_tommy) December 9, 2018
Twitter spokeswoman Kate Hayes said in an email she had no comment on the criticism.
In a special report in August, Reuters described how hate speech proliferated on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook at the peak of the military crackdown.
In August 2017, hundreds of new Twitter accounts suddenly sprang up in Myanmar.
Many of the tweets on these accounts appeared to be attempts to counter sympathetic portrayals of the Rohingya by the Western news media and human rights activists.
Reuters reported that these and similar tweets could still be found online nearly a year after the crackdown. Twitter's "hateful conduct policy" forbids attacking groups of people on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin, or engaging in "behaviour that incites fear about a protected group".
Reuters added that Twitter removed a number of tweets the news agency flagged to it in the run up to the publication of the report.
Dorsey had last month run into trouble in India after he was pictured holding up a placard saying "Smash Brahminical Partriarchy".
(With inputs from Reuters)