Rohingya refugees are suing Facebook over the tech giant’s alleged failure to stop hate speech on its platform leading to violence being committed against the Myanmar minority group.

The community has filed a $US150 billion ($A212 billion) lawsuit against Facebook in California, for allegedly exacerbating violence against community members.

Since 2016, a military-backed persecution campaign has driven up to 900,000 Rohingyas, who are mainly Muslim, across the border into Bangladesh where they now live in refugee camps

The suit alleges the algorithms that power Facebook promote disinformation and extremist thought that translates to real-world violence.

“Facebook is like a robot programmed with a singular mission: to grow,” court documents say.

“The undeniable reality is that Facebook’s growth, fuelled by hate, division, and misinformation, has left hundreds of thousands of devastated Rohingya lives in its wake.”

Rohingyas have faced decades of widespread discrimination in Myanmar, where they are despised as interlopers despite having lived in the country for generations.

The UN has said that a military-backed campaign that saw hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven across the border into Bangladesh in 2017 was “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

Thousands more remain in Myanmar, where they are not permitted citizenship and are subject to communal violence, as well as official discrimination by the ruling military junta.

The legal complaint argues that Facebook’s algorithms are “open to exploitation by autocratic politicians and regimes”.

Human rights groups have said that Facebook does not do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation and misinformation online.

They say that even when alerted to hate speech on its platform, the company often fails to act.

Activists claim Facebook allows falsehoods to proliferate, affecting the lives of minorities and skewing elections in democracies such as the United States, where unfounded charges of fraud circulate and intensify among like-minded friends.

This year, a huge leak by a company insider sparked articles arguing Facebook, whose parent company is now called Meta, knew its sites could harm some of their billions of users — but executives chose growth over safety.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the US Congress in October that Facebook was “fanning ethnic violence” in some countries.

Under US law, Facebook is largely protected from liability over content posted by its users.

But the Rohingya lawsuit argues that where applicable, the law of Myanmar — which has no such protections — should be used in the case.

Melbourne Rohingya community leader Majid Abdul says social media has been used widely to target members of his community.

“Social media has been weaponised by the Myanmar Government in their on-going campaign against us. They have used it to incite violence against innocent people,” Mr Abdul said.