iMAP Myanmar 2023 Internet Censorship Report | Page 9 Introduction The country of Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been under the rule of a repressive military regime for decades. After democratic reforms and the military sharing power with elected lawmakers in 2011, Myanmar entered the digital revolution in 2012, and digital access has grown quickly since then. Increasingly affordable SIMs and smartphones, combined with more internet service providers and high-speed connection access points, led to an increase in the number of internet users in the country. However, even after nearly a decade of sharing power with elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the state of internet censorship remained uneven. Myanmar is now repeating the old system of censorship similar to the last decade, which largely prevented online information access, particularly access to websites covering the many human rights abuses after the recent two years of military rule. In this report, Independent Researchers through iMAP aim to explore the most recent internet censorship trends and events in Myanmar by examining the network interference measurements found in OONI data from July 2022 to June 2023. iMAP has been working in Myanmar for two years to gather evidence on internet censorship by using the OONI tool to identify blocked websites.

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