14 The International Journal of Press/Politics 00(0) stand against Myit Sone Dam [the mega dam project launched by China in the northern area of the country]. Some people said it was not so much that Facebook was responsible for dividing or uniting people, but rather the platform was just reflecting a divided society. “As we are losing trust with government and with each other, we just tend to trust whatever we see on Facebook,” according to a man identifying as a religious minority. Discussion Our interviews revealed that Facebook plays an important role in Myanmar. Individuals rely heavily on Facebook for news. Respondents reported reading a range of sources on Facebook. People told us Facebook allows them to bypass censorship, and many believed it serves as a corrective to the official narrative. But, a closer look at the interviews shows that the majority of people we spoke with are hostile toward international media—also available on Facebook and also a possible corrective to the official narrative. Therefore, the people we interviewed overwhelmingly did not incorporate foreign accounts of the Rohingya crisis into their perspectives. This suggests that people do not use Facebook to challenge their viewpoints or the government’s narrative of the Rohingya crisis in a meaningful way. This is consistent with our other finding that most people engage selectively with information. Thus, our interviews and focus groups show that confirmation bias exists and that while some open-minded people seek out information that contests their perspective, most people are less tolerant and avoid news that challenge their worldview. The majority simply described information they disagreed with as “biased” and disregarded it. Moreover, individuals are limited in their ability to fact-check. Consistent with what we know of Western Facebook users, the people we interviewed in Myanmar relied on various heuristics to ascertain whether information is trustworthy: friends, family, or simply their intuition. Only a small minority of people engaged in more sophisticated fact-checking like trying to find corroborating news stories when they see a particular story or post go viral. Many of respondents reported seeing extreme speech on Facebook and some said they actively tried to counter it. Most users, however, were not upset about extreme speech and said it was par for the course on Facebook—a medium they see as bringing the country’s existing ethnic cleavages into full view. While none of the people we spoke with blamed Facebook for these cleavages, our interviews suggest that the information on Facebook made ethnic conflict more salient, yet nobody said that Facebook should be shut down or eliminated. Many of our respondents were more concerned about how users interact with the information on Facebook than the platform itself. They called for more media literacy and education. Overall, people viewed Facebook as having both a positive and negative effect on their country. Further research is clearly needed, but our data reveal no meaningful difference between Facebook users and non-users in their opinions toward the Rohingya. The