For example, access to cell phones may either increase (Pierskalla and Hollenbach 2013), or decrease incidence of violent events (Pierskalla and Hollenbach 2013; Shapiro and Weidmann 2015). Internet and social media also facilitate communication, and there are several examples of governments shutting down cell phone networks or administering internet blackouts in an attempt to contain protests (Manacorda and Tesei 2020). However, disentangling the effect of social media from other technology and information sources is a difficult challenge in empirical research. Enikolopov et al. (2020) use information on the early users of a Russian social media platform VK as an instrument for geographic variation in the penetration of the platform years later. The authors show that during a protests wave in 2011, higher social media use had a significant positive effect on probability of protest and protest participation. Bursztyn et al. (2019) investigate whether social media use is related to hate crimes and xenophobic attitudes. Exploiting the identification strategy from Enikolopov et al. (2020), they show that social media does not have an average effect, but in areas where the pre-existing level of nationalism is high, the impact of social media is also more adverse. The effects are also found to be more pronounced in the initial years of social media diffusion. Based on a survey experiment, Bursztyn et al. (2019) suggest that social media facilitates finding other intolerant people and thereby increases the number of people with xenophobic beliefs. Using information on internet outages, Müller and Schwarz (2020) show that anti-refugee sentiment on social media is linked to higher level of hate crimes against refugees, and similarly suggest that social media enables spreading extremist views. The importance of pre-existing prejudices is also evident in the literature on propaganda in traditional media (e.g. Adena et al. 2015). 3. Background 3.1. Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar Myanmar has a severely divided society, and the country has been engrossed with ethnic conflict since its independence in 1948. The state has supported the domination of the Bamar-Buddhist majority, and many of the country’s numerous ethnic groups have been subjected to discrimination and exclusion. According to the Human Rights Council (2018), the state’s systematic marginalization of many ethnic groups has served a deliberate purpose in motivating the military’s powerful position in politics. One source of ethnic conflict is the citizenship law from 1982, which granted citizenship only to the so called “national races”. “National race” has since become a key component in identity politics, defining who belongs to Myanmar and who doesn’t. A number of minority groups, including the Rohingya, are not a national race, but are instead seen as 5