5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED appeared seemingly overnight hawking cheap Chinese smartphones. The state-run telecom provider, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications, partnered with two Japanese firms the same year, further increasing competition and connectivity. Mobile penetration leapt to 56 percent by 2015, according to a Deloitte report, with many Burmese accessing the internet for the first time on phones. Today, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, citing official figures, internet access is around 25 percent and mobile penetration around 90 percent. In a recent briefing in Washington, DC, one longtime Myanmar expert described the adoption of Facebook that followed this sudden uptick in connectivity as the fastest in the world. Predictably, this has all had a huge impact on the distribution of information. Last year, a public opinion survey from the International Republican Institute found that 38 percent of people polled got most, if not all, their news from Facebook. Respondents said that they were most likely to get their news from Facebook rather than newspapers, though radio, relatives and friends, and TV were more popular. There are now an estimated 18 million people who use Facebook in Myanmar, according to the company. While the positive developments in Myanmar under Thein Sein were noteworthy, tremendous challenges remained. Conflicts between the still-powerful military and a number of ethnic armed groups, some of whom had been battling for greater autonomy for decades, continued or intensified. Land confiscation and human rights violations remained pervasive. Bouts of violence in 2012 between Buddhists and the Rohingya on the country’s west coast added a new obstacle to the country’s precarious path toward a fuller democracy. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised as they languished in ramshackle camps. During the decades of military rule, the country lacked a free press and the junta operated largely in secret—the military changed the country’s flag and moved the capital with almost no prior warnings— people in Myanmar had spent decades reliant on state-run propaganda newspapers, parsing opaque military announcements for what was really happening. The arrival of Facebook provided a country with severely limited digital literacy a hyper-connected version of the country’s ubiquitous tea shops where people gathered to swap stories, news and gossip. “Myanmar is a country run by rumors, where people fill in the blanks,” says Derek Mitchell, who served as US Ambassador to Myanmar from 2012 to 2016. There is a great insecurity and fear among people in Myanmar that unseen powers are working in the shadows to control the levers of power, Mitchell says. The arrival of Facebook provided a platform for these rumors to spread at an alarming rate. “Facebook could have done more to proactively talk about positive speech,” he says, ���how to look at things on Facebook to avoid pitfalls, and the dangers of negative speech, put their brand behind a more constructive approach to the platform.” As hate speech and dubious articles quickly began to surface in volume on Facebook in 2012 and 2013, many targeting Muslims and the Rohingya in particular, the government raised concerns that the site could be used to incite unrest. Some activists and rights groups, however, were not totally convinced of the threat of online hate speech. In 2013 an official from Human Rights Watch was largely dismissive that Facebook could play a major role in the spread of hate speech. He pointed to pamphlets distributed by monks and ultra-nationalist https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 9/16