The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South We reached out to Facebook. We documented examples and tried to explain why content moderation could not be outsourced to users alone. What outsiders often dismissed as “a digital literacy issue” was, for us, clearly tied to platform incentives, weak moderation in Burmese, and deep historical fault lines being exploited through new tools. 100 The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South Myanmar in Transition The Early Warning To understand why those years mattered so much, you have to remember the atmosphere in Myanmar in the early 2010s. After decades of military rule, the country was taking tentative steps toward democracy. Political prisoners were being released. Censorship was relaxed. The outside world flooded in (journalists, aid workers, investors) each with their own version of the “opening up of Myanmar.” At the same time, something else was happening: the internet was arriving almost overnight. Only a couple of years earlier, a SIM card could cost as much as $2000-$500 USD. By 2013, prices had started dropping, and international operators were rushing in. Suddenly, millions of people were online for the first time. Most of them skipped desktops entirely and went straight to cheap smartphones. We called it the shift from No Phone to a Smart Phone country. For many, Facebook was the internet. It became the place to share photos, gossip, prayers, political debates. It was intoxicating, this sudden sense of being connected to one another after years of isolation. But the speed of adoption outpaced everything else: laws, media institutions, community norms. MIDO was born in that tension. In 2012, we set out to build Myanmar’s first digital rights organization. At the start, our focus was broad: digital literacy, access, freedom of expression online. But very quickly, our work also began to focus on the darker side of Myanmar’s sudden connectivity. We started tracking Facebook. Every day, we saw how hate speech spread faster than anything else. We saw which pages were driving divisions. We saw how narratives targeting Muslims and the Rohingya community traveled with frightening speed. We tried to respond. We supported journalists and youth groups to recognize and counter hate speech. We published our findings. We reached out to Facebook with translations and examples, trying to explain what was happening. But the scale was overwhelming. Posts went viral in hours; our reports took days. However, it did not take long for Facebook to turn into a space of fear. Old tensions, ethnic and religious divides that had simmered for decades, suddenly had new megaphones. Pages glorified extremist monks and networks. Rumors of Muslims abducting Buddhist women spread overnight. Content designed to provoke outrage found eager audiences. From the beginning, many of us in civil society saw what was coming. This was not just random chatter. It was coordinated, systematic, and amplified by the very design of the platform. A rumor posted in one township could jump across the country in hours, landing in communities that had never even met the people they were being told to fear. We started warning as early as 2012. We reached out to Facebook. We documented examples and tried to explain why content moderation could not be outsourced to users alone. What outsiders often dismissed as “a digital literacy issue” was, for us, clearly tied to platform incentives, weak moderation in Burmese, and deep historical fault lines being exploited through new tools. By 2013, the risks were flashing red. The violence in Meiktila that March, where dozens were killed and thousands displaced, was preceded by waves of online posts spreading dehumanizing language and inflammatory rumors. For us, the link was undenia Reclaiming the Missing Story: Platform Accountability In Myanmar What made it harder was the silence. Platforms rarely replied, or sent us stock answers about reporting mechanisms. International researchers visited Yangon, wrote papers about Myanmar’s “Facebook revolution,” but rarely cited or credited the local civil society that had been monitoring the risks since day one. We were not just “users” of the platform. We were investigators, monitors, first responders. But to the outside world, we remained background characters, not experts in those first few years. The Missing Story I remember the 2013 Internet Governance Forum. That is where I met Sarah Wynn-Williams. We spoke briefly about Myanmar’s fragile online space. Later, I sent emails outlining our concerns in more detail: how hate speech was spreading, how Facebook was already playing a dangerous role. Back home, the ground was shifting quickly. The Meiktila violence confirmed our worst fears. Online dehumanization had translated into real-world bloodshed. At MIDO, our team was scrambling. We built systems to monitor hate speech. We saved screenshots before posts disappeared. We translated Burmese content into English for outsiders who could not read it. We trained volunteers to spot and flag dangerous narratives. We stayed up late, drafting emails to Facebook staff, trying to get urgent posts taken down. Most of the time, we heard nothing back. And when replies came, they felt perfunctory: Reclaiming the Missing Story: Platform Accountability In Myanmar We started tracking Facebook. Every day, we saw how hate speech spread faster than anything else. We saw which pages were driving divisions. 101