DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Stereotypes and prejudices towards Muslims have existed since the days of British colonial rule, and the mass migration of Muslims from present-day India and Bangladesh into Myanmar. In more modern history, the emergence and rapid proliferation of the 969 reiterated how pervasive this anti-Muslim sentiment still is. The Ma Ba Tha’s powerful and organized communications apparatus has recognized the populist appeal of these anti-Muslim narratives. It has latched onto many pre-existing Buddhist grievances against Muslims, and transformed them into a coherent message that is relevant to a modern audience and is coordinated with an on the ground activist and lobbying strategy. This message has very close similarities with broader patterns of hate and dangerous speech in Myanmar. In fact, a “Listening Project” conducted by Oxford University and MIDO in Myanmar in 2015 interviewed 78 local residents across six cities and found that “narrators described Muslims as violent, untrustworthy, and devout.”84 Many of the themes they identified are identical to those we will outline below. For our analysis, we identified and then monitored the public content of 100 Facebook accounts. This sample primarily consisted of monks, including all those on the Central Committee whose accounts we could identify, and then built out to the originators, disseminators, and consumers of their content. Wherever relevant and applicable, we also included government officials and politicians, in addition to several hate speech accounts that closely mirror with the messaging of Central Committee monks. We primarily relied on manual observation of these accounts, but we also sought to conduct some limited quantitative social network analysis. In particular, we attempted to map follower convergence to obtain a sense of the relative inter-connectedness of the followers of accounts in our sample. The visualization below maps 18 accounts within the sample, including monks, politicians, and lay people. Each account’s publicly available friends list was manually hand-coded without the use of any automated program and then imported into Gephi, a network visualization tool. Gephi identified repeated names between each public friends list, and produced the visualizations below. The graph visualizes a total of 32,614 Facebook accounts and 47,205 connections between the accounts with an inter-connected score of 2 or more (i.e. an account that is following at least 2 of the 18 accounts in the sample). Image 9: Data Visualization of Extract of Core Sample 13