In response, six Myanmar-based advocacy groups wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in April 2018, complaining about the shortage of moderators and lack of investment in moderation in a Facebook-dependent country like Myanmar where social media has become a major channel for hate speech and disinformation. In the letter, the authors wrote “this case exemplifies the very opposite of effective moderation: it reveals an overreliance on third parties, a lack of a proper mechanism for emergency escalation, a reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic solutions, and a lack of transparency.” (UNHRC, 2018) As Lwin and Brown (2019) write, even with an increased team of 99 Myanmar reviewers, “these individuals, who screen user-generated content for violations of Facebook’s policies, will not be enough to cover the vast volume of daily posts generated by the country’s nearly 20 million users.” Under pressure for its inaction on hate speech during the crisis in Rakhine State, Facebook moved to take a number of steps to restrict hate speech and disinformation related to Myanmar on its platform. In August 2018, Facebook took the relatively unprecedented step of removing the account of Commander in Chief Min Aung Hlaing, as well as 52 other military-linked pages and 18 military-linked accounts, which had been linked with anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim propaganda, and which had over 12 million followers. A range of groups had highlighted the inflammatory posts coming from these accounts as contributing to anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar. In October 2018, Facebook removed more Myanmar-military linked accounts, claiming that the accounts were “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook in Myanmar” (Frontier, 2018). Min Aung Hlaing retreated to the Russian social media site VKontakte, which subsequently also removed his account. Recent reports also indicate that an account linked to the Commander in Chief on Twitter (which is not widely used in Myanmar) was shut down in May 2019 (Moe Myint, 2019b). By the middle of 2018, Facebook officials claimed that they had “proactively identified 63 percent of the hate speech we removed in Myanmar” and had 99 Myanmar-language speakers reviewing content in several locations. Some observers expressed skepticism, however, over a lack of moderators, and continued moderator errors by moderators who may not be closely familiar with the Myanmar context. Other observers indicated more concerns about Facebook’s ability to combat hate speech and disinformation, indicating Facebook’s reliance on a small 10