9/24/21, 7:33 PM Facebook shut down commercial disinformation network based in Myanmar and Vietnam | by @DFRLab | DFRLab | Medium Table showing the chronology of the *31# posts across the network using the UNIX timestamps retrieved from the source code of each post’s Facebook page. The posts were broken into two rounds almost 3 hours apart. (Source: @jean_leroux/DFRLab via Facebook) Shared posting conventions In another indication of coordination, the pages posted content with typographical similarities. Some of the posts, for instance, contained text in triplicate, with demarcated sections posted in “English,” “Unicode,” and “Zawgyi.” The Burmese alphabet has historically been type-faced using the Zawgyi font, a set of non-compliant Unicode characters that was used as a stopgap to encode the alphabet into electronic text. A Unicode-compliant version of the character set was adopted by Myanmar in 2019 but is still being phased in. By using three types of characters, the page administrators ensured that the posts were readable by as large an audience as possible. At least three of the assets in the network shared this strategy, which the official MyTel and MyTelPay Facebook pages had also adopted. https://medium.com/dfrlab/facebook-shut-down-commercial-disinformation-network-based-in-myanmar-and-vietnam-d8c07c518c04 14/15