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The International Journal of Press/Politics 00(0)
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the generous reviewers, the participants in the Social Science Research
Council’s workshop on Digital Threats to Democracy, and Catie Bailard for their time and constructive feedback. We also appreciate the research assistance of Halle Young, a University of
Massachusetts Lowell Emerging Scholar. Any mistakes are our own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Jenifer Whitten-Woodring
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3889-675X
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
1. We use the term extreme speech in accordance with Udupa and Pohjonen (2019) definition. According to Udupa and Pohjonen, extreme speech is a concept that “captures digital
cultures that push and provoke the limits of legitimate speech along the twin axes of truthfalsity and civility-incivility” (p. 3051).
2. We use the term disinformation because it captures the deliberate dissemination of inaccurate information and avoids the usage of the politicized term “fake news” which has been
used to discredit the mainstream press.
3. We use the terms “people in Myanmar” and “people of Myanmar” to refer to the general
population. Others have used the term “Burmese,” but this term actually pertains to the
Bamar people, who represent Myanmar’s majority ethnic group.
4. NLD is the party of former opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
5. Rakhine state is where the majority of Rohingya have historically lived.
6. Conservative estimates put the number of Facebook users in Myanmar at 18 million, about
33 percent of Myanmar’s estimated 53.8 million total population (McLaughlin 2018).
7. Wirathu’s Facebook account was blocked in 2018 after he posted explicit hate speech
(Lee 2019).
8. Derogatory term used for the Rohingya, meaning “foreigner.”
9. Lehmann-Jacobsen found that people no longer viewed the international broadcast media
to be trustworthy because their accounts about the Rohingya contrasted with those from
local news media.
10. We note that there are studies that question the extent to which these dynamics actually
occur. Zuiderveen Borgesius et al. (2016) argue there is little empirical evidence that personalized media content leads to echo chambers, information cocoons, or filter bubbles;