5/27/22, 2:20 AM How activists are using Facebook in Myanmar for democratic ends, but Facebook itself also facilitated hate speech | LSE So… This optimism about social media is built into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s extended 2017 manifesto ‘Building Global Community’, where he argues that Facebook helps to build ‘supportive…safe…informed…civically engaged and inclusive communities’. In a 2018 Facebook series on social media and democracy, a Facebook Civic Engagement manager said that, ‘I believe that a more connected world can be a more democratic one’. Yet when Facebook is used as a platform for hate speech and organised violence, the company has been quick to deflect blame from the platform and stress the role of its users. Thus, when used towards liberal democratic ends it is often alleged that it is the platform’s influence, and when use is illiberal or anti-democratic, it is the result of bad users in a specific context. We draw on the example of Facebook in Myanmar and seek to emphasise the opposite: when Facebook is used for democratic organising, such as following Myanmar’s recent coup, then the agency, bravery and creativity of individual users—who face significant barriers and risks when utilising the platform—ought to be recognised by the media and public. Conversely, when Facebook is used as a platform for hate speech, as it was by illiberal anti-Muslim movements in Myanmar, then Facebook’s preparations, practices, and policies require greater scrutiny. We conclude that it is crucial in developing countries to recognise and question narratives of digital ‘solutionism’: optimistic narratives that assume technological solutions to complex social, political and economic challenges. Facebook’s growth in Myanmar The pace of Facebook’s spread in Myanmar in the early 2010s was extraordinary. Market research companies estimated that there were 1.2 million Facebook users in Myanmar in 2014. Yet by January 2019 there were 21 million Facebook users in Myanmar which is around 40 percent of the country’s population. Crucially, Facebook enjoyed an almost monopoly of social media usage, accounting for more than 99 percent of the social media market in Myanmar. One Yangon cyber security analyst said that ‘Facebook is arguably the only source of information online for the majority in Myanmar’. There are several reasons Facebook enjoys such dominance in Myanmar. Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ initiative in the developing world and partnerships with telecommunications providers such as Norway’s Telenor helped fuel Facebook’s extraordinary expansion. After its entry in 2014, Telenor offered a deal where customers could use Facebook on their mobile device without any data charges. Importantly, as internet connectivity was expanding, the quality of connections remained poor, but in this early phase of expansion Facebook loaded better than other platforms. Lastly, Facebook established deals with manufacturers and retailers to have Facebook preloaded on to Burmese mobile phones. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/seac/2021/06/23/how-activists-are-using-facebook-in-myanmar-for-democratic-ends-but-facebook-itself-also-facilitated-hat… 2/12