Last month, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s News Feed head, said in an interview that he and other Facebook executives “lose some sleep” over the possibility that Facebook had led to real-world violence.

Mr. Petersen said he hoped Mr. Zuckerberg’s appeal would spur actual change and not just expressions of worry. “I wonder how he spent those sleepless nights — because we didn’t see that much change,” he said.

Here is the full text of Mr. Zuckerberg’s email to the civil society groups, followed by the groups’ response:

Mark Zuckerberg’s email

Dear Htaike Htaike, Jes, Victoire, Phyu Phyu and Thant, I wanted to personally respond to your open letter. Thank you for writing it and I apologize for not being sufficiently clear about the important role that your organizations play in helping us understand and respond to Myanmar-related issues, including the September incident you referred to. In making my remarks, my intention was to highlight how we’re building artificial intelligence to help us better identify abusive, hateful or false content even before it is flagged by our community. These improvements in technology and tools are the kinds of solutions that your organizations have called on us to implement and we are committed to doing even more. For example, we are rolling out improvements to our reporting mechanism in Messenger to make it easier to find and simpler for people to report conversations. In addition to improving our technology and tools, we have added dozens more Burmese language reviewers to handle reports from users across all our services. We have also increased the number of people across the company on Myanmar-related issues and we now we have a special product team working to better understand the specific local challenges and build the right tools to help keep people there safe. There are several other improvements we have made or are making, and I have directed my teams to ensure we are doing all we can to get your feedback and keep you informed. We are grateful for your support as we map out our ongoing work in Myanmar, and we are committed to working with you to find more ways to be responsive to these important issues. Mark

The civil society groups’ response. The half-dozen signatories of the response include Phandeeyar, a leading technology hub in the country; the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, which monitors online hate speech; and the Center for Social Integrity.