3210 Ronan Lee International Journal of Communication 13(2019) 2018a; Lee, 2016; Weng, 2017). In 2016, I reported to Facebook an anti-Muslim post by Wirathu that I believed breached Facebook’s Community Standards; it took weeks and numerous other complaints before this post was removed by Facebook’s monitors. Myanmar is an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, and despite the Buddhist population accounting for 87.9% of the population and Muslims for only 4.3%, nationalists argue Myanmar’s Buddhist character is facing an existential threat from Islam (Department of Population, 2016). The conversion of previously Buddhist-dominated communities to Islam in what are now Indonesia and Malaysia has contributed to a common Buddhist and nationalist trope in Myanmar that its own Buddhist character could similarly be threatened by Islam (Gravers, 2015; “‘Muslims Are Dangerous,’” 2015). This narrative has been frequently cited by nationalist figures like Wirathu to justify their claims that Myanmar Buddhism faces an existential threat from Islam that ought to be resisted (Beech, 2013; Hodal, 2013). Myanmar’s Buddhist nationalists suggest it is in the national interest to defend the Buddhist religion from this perceived threat and advocate restrictions on Muslims’ civil and political rights. This advocacy has often been successful. Myanmar nationalists’ use of new media freedoms to incite hatred of Muslims and of the Rohingya has attracted international attention. Facebook has been widely used by nationalists and has been particularly criticized for being slow to remove inappropriate content (Hogan & Safi, 2018; McLaughlin, 2018; Mozur, 2018). Facebook’s anemic response to complaints about inappropriate content in Myanmar was raised by U.S. lawmakers when the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary Committees (Hatmaker, 2018). Similar concerns were raised by the UN agencies in the aftermath of the Rohingya’s 2017 forced migration. The chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Marzuki Darusan, described how social media, particularly Facebook, contributed to public attitudes that played a “determining role” in Myanmar, describing how it has “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media” (Miles, 2018, para. 6). Following media liberalization, the Myanmar public thus have been subject to a steady stream of anti-Rohingya messages from Buddhist nationalists, the military, and political figures. Negative messages on social media have gone hand in hand with violent attacks against the Rohingya on the ground. Nationalist groups have been criticized for the role they played in instigating violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State during 2012. This violence, which left around 200 dead and tens of thousands homeless, is often described as a communal conflict between Buddhists and Muslims, but members of Rakhine State’s Muslim Rohingya community were the most victimized (HRW, 2012). The authorities’ response was to separate the two communities, but the burden of this policy overwhelmingly fell on the Muslim community, with around 140,000 Rohingya then confined to supposedly temporary IDP (internally displaced person) camps where at least 100,000 remain five years later. In 2015, Myanmar’s national parliament passed a collection of laws championed by nationalists. Known as the Protection of Race and Religion package, it comprised the Population Control Health Care Law, the Religious Conversion Bill, the Myanmar Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Bill, and the Monogamy Bill (Caster, 2015; Wa Lone, 2015). The proposals were opposed by human rights organizations and civil society