to understand how the narrative of “the land grabbing Bengali” is expressed and wider spread
and accepted rather than the narrative of “the crisis of the Rohingya”.
If we then look at Miller´s prediction from 2011 that Facebook will become “just one more
medium for facilitating political action rather than a tool for the revolution and transformation
of politics I would not entirely agree in the context of Myanmar. In the case of Myanmar, it
has been proved that military-related personalities have misused Facebook to be able to
spread hate speech and “fake news” as propaganda. These persons ware, as a result of the
Human Right Council fact-finding-report, removed from Facebook to prevent them from
using the service to inflame ethnic and religious tensions in the country further (Chau, 2018;
Mozur, 2018). This also means that Facebook can be, and has been, described as a tool to
utter and spread particular views, and therefore in its way transformed politic and/or a
political outcome and public attitude.
It is here I once more will point to the echo chamber effect. With government and military
personalities speaking out on behalf of one particular narrative spreading information to
support this particular view. Combined with the fact that Facebook is the local user’s main
access point to information and the way algorithms use personal information as well as the
given person´s network, it is not hard to understand how the general view becomes
accustomed to this particular narrative as well. It is moreover a valid explanation for the lack
of sufficient reported content. If we assume that most people know how to report a post or
content, they probably still would not report it, if they already share the general understanding
of the conflict as “the land grabbing Bengali” rather than “the crisis of the Rohingya.” It is
also essential to be aware that Facebook is an important factor, but it is not transcendent.
Miller writes that Facebook primarily affects close social relations (Daniel Miller, 2011, p.
170), as we have seen in chapter 5. Even so, I would argue that Facebook in addition to the
close relations, in the Myanmar context is part of shaping more general perspectives in and on
a society.
Khine, one of my informants was, after my stay in Yangon, thrown out of Facebook. He had
up to several times shared content in his Facebook feed, which would fall under the category
of hate speech according to Facebook´s guidelines. As shown in figure VII,
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