BSR | Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar 51 SYSTEMWIDE CHANGE Recommendation Integrate human rights considerations into advocacy efforts aimed at policy, legal, and regulatory reform in Myanmar and the ASEAN region. Facebook can develop a position on policy, legal, and regulatory reform in Myanmar and proactively pursue it via advocacy, especially through face-to-face meetings and relationship-building. This position would likely cover items such as laws and regulations on cybercrime, telecommunications, and hate speech. BSR recognizes the challenges of advocacy efforts in Myanmar, especially given the lack of due process. For this reason, Facebook could also offer technical assistance and legal expertise to local stakeholders with shared policy, legal, and regulatory objectives. Specific opportunities may exist to collaborate with other private sector actors, both inside and outside the technology sector, or for coalition-building and joint efforts with stakeholders. Special attention should be paid to policy, legal, and regulatory developments of greatest relevance to Facebook, such as the emerging proposals for a government “social media monitoring team.” Continue to participate in the Unicode transition campaign. Facebook has a critical and decisive role to play in the transition to Unicode, such as removing Zawgyi as an option for new Facebook users and improving font converters for existing users. Explanation During BSR’s assessment, several stakeholders emphasized the importance of companies, including Facebook, advocating proactively for policy, legal, and regulatory reform. On issues of greatest relevance to this assessment—security, privacy, and freedom of expression—several experts referred to the desire to see greater alignment of policy frameworks across the ASEAN region and said that a focus on ASEAN could have positive long-term consequences for Myanmar. Many also emphasized that the government’s desire to see economic success, including the development of a digital economy, strengthens the influence that companies have. The GNI Principles state that “individually and collectively, participants will engage governments and international institutions to promote the rule of law and the adoption of laws, policies and practices that protect, respect and fulfil freedom of expression and privacy.” Principle 19 of the UNGPs states that “If the business enterprise has leverage to prevent or mitigate the adverse impact, it should exercise it. And if it lacks leverage there may be ways for the enterprise to increase it. Leverage may be increased by, for example, offering capacity-building or other incentives to the related entity, or collaborating with other actors.” Unicode is the global industry standard to encode and display fonts, including for Burmese and other local Myanmar languages. However, over 90 percent of phones in Myanmar use Zawgyi, which is only used to display Burmese. This means that someone with a Zawgyi phone can’t read instructions written in Unicode properly. The transition to Unicode will have a positive impact on human rights (such as improving freedom of expression, making it easier for users to report harmful content, and enhancing efforts to address hate speech, harassment, and misinformation), but it is important that Facebook work with other entities for a smooth transition. BSR notes that, as part of efforts towards this transition, Facebook has recently disabled Unicode for new users and expanded Zawgi / Unicode conversion functionality. Introduce innovations on the Facebook platform that increase the digital and media literacy of users in Myanmar. There are several actions that Facebook can take directly—some of them already underway—that can increase user awareness of the reliability of content in BSR interviews both inside and outside Facebook suggested that new innovations, such as text providing further context about the news source, would be especially important and effective in Myanmar, given the low level of digital and media literacy and the relatively young nature of local news sources. This