Executive summary
After the 2021 coup, independent media were forced into exile, leaving many outlets wholly dependent on social media platforms to reach audiences, publish reporting, and sustain their work. This report, one of a series on media freedom during the 2025-26 sham elections, reveals how heightened reliance has exposed the media to a growing range of human rights harms originating from both digital platforms themselves and from their users.
Key findings
• International standards and platform commitments to protect media content, especially during elections, are wide-ranging but lack mechanisms for ensuring implementation. Commitments without adequate transparency or remedies are effectively meaningless.
• Myanmar’s elections acted as a catalyst for digital hostility, with 69% of media reporting that threats worsened during the election countdown. This surge in hostile content, often unmoderated by platforms, effectively
alienated the media from its audience at a critical civic moment.
• Every media was affected by arbitrary deletions made by unaccountable and opaque “black box” algorithms. Platforms deleted journalistic photography, videos, and critical text reporting, often removing public interest information and vital evidence of human rights abuses.
• Platforms proved unreachable during the electoral period. While 88% of
media attempted to appeal unfair deletions, 82% found the process entirely useless, describing the experience as “shouting into a void” due to a lack of accessible human review.
• Platforms have become inadvertent tools of financial censorship. 50% of
media receive zero monetisation revenue because platform eligibility requirements, such as host country business registration, are unattainable
for media operating in exile.