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operations, and in influence operations that were attributed to the Myanmar military in 2018 and 2019 (a more recent takedown of Myanmar military assets focused primarily on the Army itself). Facebook Activity In its report on inauthentic behavior, Facebook said that the Myanmar takedown assets were “tied to a number of separate spam networks that distributed clickbait to drive traffic to ad-heavy domains in Myanmar. These networks misled people about the purpose of their Pages and used fake accounts to evade our limits on the frequency of posting. The people behind this behavior created Pages and Groups that were made to look independent of each other and posted at high rates to drive people to connected ad-heavy websites. “In an attempt to build audiences, they posted content ranging from celebrity gossip to local news. A minority of posts from some of these networks and their ad-heavy websites focused on politics in Myanmar, including support for the military and references to ethnic tensions. We did not see evidence of these networks being politically motivated. Instead, they focused on current events most likely to drive clicks and redirect traffic to off-platform domains.” Graphika reviewed the assets before they were taken down. The pages made up a number of distinct clusters, some of them with differences in the detail of their behavior. Nevertheless, they used some of the same basic techniques, especially in their tendency to mass-post clickbait content and to work in clusters to drive traffic to a single website at high frequencies. The pages had very large audiences and engagement figures, comparable with popular verified pages in Burmese entertainment and celebrity life. The page with the highest engagement had gained 5.4 million likes by the time it was taken down. Sixty-four other pages each had over 1 million likes, and 438 pages had over 100,000 likes each. For comparison, the verified page Myanmar Celebrity TV had 10.3 million likes as of October 20. The verified pages of leading newspapers 7Day News and the Myanmar Times had 25 million and 4.9 million likes respectively. For context and scale on these numbers, a list of 14 “entertainment media” pages from Myanmar on Crowdtangle, including the verified pages for Myanmar People Magazine and TV stations MRTV-4 and Channel 7 Myanmar, had a combined total of 27 million likes by mid-October. A Crowdtangle list of 40 celebrities that included the verified fan pages for actor Sai Sai Kham Leng, actress Wutt Hmone Shwe Yi and rock singer Lay Phyu had a combined total of 44 million likes. At the time of the takedown, the 14 most engaged-with pages that Graphika reviewed had a combined total of 40 million likes. The 40 most engaged-with pages had a total of just over 80 million likes. 2

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Myanmar Inauthentic Behavior Takedown

Investigation / Case Study

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Language

English

Topic

Disinformation
Hate Speech
Information Operation
Platform / Tech Accountability

Author(s)

Avneesh Chandra
Camille Francois
Graphika
Lea Ronzaud
Myat Thu
Shawn Eib
Victoire Rio

Date Published: Oct 22, 2020

Abstract: On October 21, Facebook published examples of inauthentic networks that it had taken down over the past several months for inauthentic behavior. The cases included 655 pages and 12 groups that were based in Myanmar. The pages formed a number of distinct clusters that appeared to be primarily designed to drive traffic to websites with a view to profit from advertising, both on Facebook and via the associated web domains. Each page typically shared content from just one web domain at a time. Multiple pages, in turn, shared content from the same domain, forming distinct clusters that served as an amplification network.

Some of the domains shared identical content and were associated with just one Google Analytics and/or Google Adsense account, suggesting that they were part of networks operated by the same entities. Some of the networks showed some degree of interconnection over time, while others appeared to be distinct.

The assets in the takedown had very high follower numbers. Dozens of the pages had over 1 million followers each, with the largest having over 5 million at the time of the takedown; scores more had followers in the hundreds of thousands. They produced large volumes of content and generated millions of interactions.

The pages appeared to operate for profit. The websites to which they linked often carried ads; some of the Facebook pages carried sponsored posts for commercial products. The majority of the content posted focused on celebrities and gossip; but in the years of their activity the pages also posted a small portion of content dealing with more political subjects or posted about the Myanmar army. A few posts in 2019-20 mentioned the Arakan Army or Rakhine state; a few from 2017 included elements of dangerous speech, notably against Muslims. In an illustration of the porous border between commercial spam and politically-oriented operations, blends of “lifestyle” clickbait with political content have been observed historically both in commercial spam operations, and in influence operations that were attributed to the Myanmar military in 2018 and 2019 (a more recent takedown of Myanmar military assets focused primarily on the Army itself).

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Myanmar Internet Project

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Myanmar Inauthentic Behavior Takedown

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