the Buddhist nationalist monk, dedicated to inciting fear and paranoia among the people of Myanmar and calling himself the ‘Burmese Bin Laden.’80 Wirathu told a reporter ‘I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers,’ in reference to Muslims, and added that he is ‘proud to be called a radical Buddhist.’81 He also claimed that there is a ‘population explosion’ of Muslims and threatens that they will ‘capture’ the country in the end.82 These opinions are seen by the thousands of followers of Wirathu’s Facebook and through his YouTube videos which have been watched tens of thousands of times. Though Wirathu is becoming internationally renowned for his extremist views, appearing on the front cover of Time magazine in 2013 with the headline ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’, he has had few vocal critics inside of Myanmar. Abbot Arriya Wuttha Bewuntha of Mandalay's Myawaddy Sayadaw monastery has spoken out to criticize his views, however. He argued that ‘this is not the way Buddha taught. What the Buddha taught is that hatred is not good, because Buddha sees everyone as an equal being. The Buddha doesn't see people through religion.’83 So just how influential can anti-Muslim content found on Facebook be? Participants from both focus groups agreed, when asked the question ‘what are the main sources that young people get information from?’ that Facebook is the main resource.84 Matthew Schissler from Paung Ku, a civil society organisation in Myanmar, describes the way people now use Facebook in Myanmar as a practice similar to the way information was gained during the decades of paranoid authoritarianism. In this period, the country’s state-run media was often biased, and published the opinions of the Junta officials as fact. ‘Rumour and word-of-mouth information are more credible 80 Hodal, K., (2013) ‘Buddhist monk uses racism and rumours to spread hatred in Burma’, The Guardian, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/18/buddhist-monk-spreadshatred-burma [November 2015]. 81 Fuller, T., (2013) ‘Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists’, The New York Times, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/asia/extremism-rises-among-myanmar-buddhistswary-of-muslim-minority.html [November 2013]. 82 Hodal, (2013). 83 Hodal, (2013). 84 Focus Group One and Two, Interview by Davis, B., (2015). - 39 -