3214 Ronan Lee International Journal of Communication 13(2019) it characterizes the situation in Rakhine State as one in which the Myanmar authorities regularly provide development help and economic benefits to the state and its residents, but where the Myanmar population is under siege from Muslim terrorists and by implication members of the Rohingya community, and second, it ignores atrocities committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities that have resulted in the largest forced migration in the region since the end of the Second World War, as well as the decades of systematic mistreatment and human rights violations against the Rohingya minority. The GNLM’s strong focus on security issues in Rakhine State mirrors the extreme speech of nationalists and encourages readers to believe the country is under siege from Muslims, who are argued to be undertaking a well-organized campaign of terror there, and that Myanmar military’s actions in Rakhine State are a legitimate and reasonable response to this threat. State media like the GNLM provide Myanmar’s residents with an indication of acceptable forms of expression that are unlikely to attract official sanction. This is a key way the GNLM contributed to an environment that excused and allowed nationalist hate speech, particularly against groups like the Rohingya, and this helped provide license and encouragement for the Myanmar military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. What is missing from GNLM is important, too, and should be considered as part of a discussion of extreme speech in Myanmar. Media choosing to ignore key facts and events can be as problematic as deliberately misreporting events. In this instance, by ignoring key facts, the GNLM has helped maintain a political environment where the Tatmadaw’s actions in Rakhine State against the Rohingya could continue without meaningful domestic political opposition. When the recent crisis began in August 2017, the Rohingya were already routinely subject to discrimination and human rights violations in Rakhine State. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London’s International State Crime Initiative described this discrimination in their 2015 report “Countdown to Annihilation” as a process of “genocide” (Green, MacManus, & de la Cour Venning, 2015). Amnesty International (2017) has described this situation as “apartheid.” GNLM articles from August 26 to September 25 were published during a period when more than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims fled a Tatmadaw “clearance operation” in Rakhine State described by senior UN figures as involving ethnic cleansing (“Rohingya Crisis,” 2017). Despite this, the GNLM presented the situation in Rakhine State as the Tatmadaw gallantly defending the nation’s sovereignty from Muslim terrorists and complained about inappropriate international interference from groups like the UN and Western media. GNLM articles do not address discrimination against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Instead, GNLM articles about Rakhine State can be categorized as either presenting positive news about economic development there or security-related articles that frequently place the blame for unrest on “extremist terrorists.” Conclusions Much of the existing literature examining the regulation of hateful or extreme speech online (A. Brown, 2017; Cohen-Almagor, 2015; Gagliardone et al, 2015) has focused largely on the role of nonstate actors as perpetrators and has routinely considered the government’s role to be primarily that of a regulator. Some researchers have called for Internet companies to play a greater role in tackling hate speech (A. Brown, 2017), but many studies that call for collective solutions to combating online hate speech assume the role of state authorities as regulators and protectors of the community from hate speech rather than treating state actors as themselves likely perpetrators of hate speech (Cohen-Almagor, 2015). While concerns about the consequences of extreme speech by individuals and nationalist groups using platforms