Just days after Mark Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook systems were catching and restricting hate messages in Myanmar, the company has apologised for its CEO’s statement. The apology comes after several NGOs in Myanmar accused Facebook of misleading people by claiming that it was doing enough to curb hate speech on the social media site.

In an open letter, six Myanmar groups slammed Facebook for not doing enough and for taking credit for curbing hate speech. The letter has been marked to Mark Zuckerberg and it comes just days after he spoke to the Vox, a website in the US, in which he said that Facebook systems were recognising hate speech and were stopping these messages from getting delivered.

But NGOs that are actually fighting hate speech in Myanmar where Muslim minority has faced violence, particularly in Rohingya region, disagree. “In your interview, you refer to your detection ‘systems’. We believe your system, in this case, was us — and we were far from systematic. We identified the messages and escalated them to your team via email on Saturday the 9th September, Myanmar time. By then, the messages had already been circulating widely for three days,” noted the open letter.

In his interview, Mark Zuckerberg had agreed that people were using Facebook to spread hate. “That’s the kind of thing where I think it is clear that people were trying to use our tools in order to incite real harm. Now, in that case, our systems detect that that’s going on. We stop those messages from going through,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying.

On Friday, after the open letter panned by Myanmar NGOs, Facebook apologised. When reached for a comment on Friday by AFP, a Facebook spokesperson conceded the company was too slow in responding to reports about the incendiary messages.

“We should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content,” the spokesperson noted. “We are sorry that Mark did not make clearer that it was the civil society groups in Myanmar who first reported these messages.”

Earlier, United Nations had formally called out Facebook on the destructive role, even if unknowingly and unintentionally, the company was playing in the communal strife in Myanmar. A senior UN official had called Facebook a “beast” that was helping people spread hate and strife.

Facebook is facing increasing criticism over the role it is playing in the people’s lives, a role that is not always positive. The company is under attack for failing to stop Russians who meddled in the US elections using social media. Recently it has come under fire over its privacy and data policies that helped Cambridge Analytica acquire private data of nearly 87 million Facebook users, including little over half million in India.