International Crisis Group Asia Report N°314 18 May 2021 Myanmar’s Military Struggles to Control the Virtual Battlefield I. Introduction Telecommunications liberalisation was a signature reform of President Thein Sein’s administration, which governed from 2011 to 2016, initiating Myanmar’s transition to semi-civilian rule. Under military rule, internet access had been tightly controlled, expensive and slow: a mobile SIM card, without internet access, cost as much as $1,000 shortly before Thein Sein came to power. Reformers in the new government quickly identified the sector as an area in which they could attract investment and deliver tangible benefits to Myanmar’s citizens, and announced plans for a tender of two mobile operator licences as soon as 2012.1 Other important reforms included the lifting of all filtering on dissident websites and steps to encourage investment in international gateways to improve internet speeds.2 The pace of change was rapid: by the time Thein Sein left office, in 2016, the telecoms sector had attracted billions of dollars in new foreign investment, and tens of millions of people were enjoying fast, cheap and unfiltered internet for the first time. Because the web reached much of Myanmar so late, most users went straight to 3G or 4G mobile internet, leapfrogging slower connections and broadband.3 Telenor of Norway and Ooredoo of Qatar launched their services in 2014, joining state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which partnered with a Japanese consortium to improve its services. The Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, in partnership with Viettel of Vietnam and a consortium of Myanmar companies, launched a fourth operator, Mytel, in 2018.4 For many people getting online for the first time, the internet was limited almost exclusively to Facebook.5 Helped along by the company’s “free basics” package that allowed users to log on without incurring data charges, and later by promotions that made it more affordable to use Facebook than other parts of the web, estimated user numbers skyrocketed – from barely one million accounts in 2013 to ten million three years later, eventually reaching over 27 million, or around 50 per cent of the population, as of January 2021.6 Facebook quickly became not just a place to keep in contact with family and friends, but also a major source of information, and an arena for political discussion, with little competition from other social media platforms. 1 “The Political Road to Digital Revolution: How Myanmar’s Telecoms Reform Happened”, Developmental Leadership Programme, January 2017. 2 “Burma lifts ban on international websites”, The Irrawaddy, 16 September 2011. 3 See “Foreign investment booms in Myanmar’s telecoms”, Nikkei Asian Review, 20 April 2017; and “The Facebook-loving farmers of Myanmar”, The Atlantic, 21 January 2016. 4 Mytel has been accused of influence operations targeting competitors on Facebook and providing the military with “off-budget revenue”. See “Myanmar’s connectivity curse”, Medium, 12 February 2021; and “Nodes of Corruption, Lines of Abuse”, Justice for Myanmar, 20 December 2020. 5 Crisis Group is a partner of Facebook and in that capacity has occasionally been in contact with Facebook regarding misinformation on the platform that could provoke deadly violence. 6 See “Facebook vows to tackle hate speech”, The Myanmar Times, 12 July 2014; and “Digital 2021: Myanmar”, We Are Social and Hootsuite, January 2021.