Mobile Myanmar: The Impact of Social Media on Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar Media and Information Literacy (MIL) at the heart of education, drawing on techniques developed to combat propaganda in the 20th century. However, such is the rapid arrival and uptake of social media, few longitudinal studies have been completed on how effective MIL programmes have been, and the Asia region is singled out for a significant paucity of data available. With growing concern in most advanced economies about the growing usage and dependence on social media services among young people especially, some studies have sought to understand the longer term psychological and physical effects of social media use on young people at the national level. The results are not encouraging. For example, a study in Korea, using data from longitudinal surveys, found strong evidence that online social networking is adversely associated with the psychological status of Korean students, measured in terms of self-reported mental problems and suicidal thought (Kim, 2016). Another study in the United States indicated a strong causal link between images of harmful behaviour (e.g., smoking, alcohol use) shared among high-school students in California, and the increase in smoking and drinking among the same peer groups (Huang, et al., 2013). Given the increasing predominance of social media as the first point of call for news across the world, others have sought to understand the role social media has on the psychological well-being of young people at a very local level, and during episodes of acute uncertainty. For example, one 2017 study sought to understand the role of social media during a lock-down following a university campus shooting in California. Through anonymous surveys completed one week after the event, students reported feeling greater stress from receiving conflicting information on social media, and the stress was more acute among those who identified as heavy social media users. Intense periods of stress were documented when ‘official’ (i.e., the University’s own media) channels went quiet, and social media was the only source of news (Jones, Rebecca Thompson, & Silver, 2017). Should Myanmar continue to follow the pattern of more developed economies in patterns of connectedness and social media use among the young, it should prepare for more young people being online for ever greater periods of time. As a 2018 Pew Research Centre study concluded of American teens: “smartphone ownership has become a nearly ubiquitous element of teen life: 95% of teens now report they have a smartphone or access to one. These mobile connections are in turn fueling more-persistent online activities: 45% of teens now say they are online on a nearconstant basis” (Anderson & Jiang, 2018). The same study noted how quickly trends in social media platform use were prone to shifting (e.g., there has been a general decline in the use of Facebook), and even among the youth category there were marked differences when gender, socio-economic background and ethnic group were taken into account. This will make measures aimed at protecting young people from the adverse effects of social media will have to be as adaptable and agile as young people’s social media use is fickle. Despite the scale of the challenge, increasingly sophisticated approaches to better equipping young people to navigate the online world safely are being developed. Of particular note is a two-year European Commission funded programme nicknamed SELMA (Social and Emotional Learning for Mutual Awareness; SELMA, 2018). The SELMA programme launched an online toolkit in late 2018 designed to “empower young people to become agents of change… help them to better understand the phenomenon of online hate… [and] provide them with tools and strategies to act and make a difference” (SELMA, 2019). The toolkit targets young people (age 11–16) and covers a diverse set of themes, including: “what is hate speech”, “why is there hate speech content out there”, “how does hate speech make me feel”, “what’s my role and what can I do”, “are my people really using hate speech”, “how can I influence my people”, “how can we effect change in our community”, “working with online stakeholders”, and “changing the world”. The toolkit provides addition support for those seeking to understand the phenomenon of hate speech, its social and emotional impacts, how to monitor it, and how to influence change. SELMA’s first ‘hacking hate hackathon’ hosted youth teams from Italy, Denmark, Greece, the UK, and Germany in Berlin and invited them to pitch ideas for how best to counter online hate. Existing Initiatives The following organisations and initiatives are worth understanding and exploring further, given their focus monitoring and/or actively countering online hate-speech in Myanmar. For a more detailed mapping of organisations working in this space in Myanmar, see Search for Common Ground’s ‘Stakeholder mapping of countering hate speech in Myanmar’ (O'Connor, 2017). 19