Haag opened “a Preliminary Examination concerning the alleged deportation of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh”. In the investigations of the ethnic cleansing in the Rohingya crisis the HCR report says that “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those [(religious and military actors)] seeking to spread hate” (HCR, 2018). Although Myanmar is an Internet latecomer, Facebook can be considered a facilitator of racism and human rights violations in Myanmar. After strong international criticism and the release of the HCR report, Facebook reacted with the deletion of sixty-five Facebook pages and eighteen accounts, “including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the military’s Myawady television network.” Accounts and pages were removed due to content violations and “inauthentic behaviour”; which means that “they used by seemingly independent news and opinion Pages to covertly push the messages of the Myanmar military. This type of behaviour is banned under our, [Facebook’s], misrepresentation policy because we want people to be able to trust the connections they make.” (Facebook, 2018). Interviewees emphasize the relevance of trust in the connections and information on Facebook due to the mistrust of official information. This is based on the experience of five decades of military propaganda and crony business in the media (Brooten, McElhone, & Venkiteswaran, 2019), where people trust personal information from friends and family over official or media publications. Facebook activates this form of trust because it’s algorithms are designed to privilege the sharing and receiving of information within a personal ‘trusted’ networks. This renders it easy to spread disinformation, and to manipulate information by government or military officials and other elites. On the other hand, of course, new online public spheres can lead to more transparency in governments and militaries activities, as former Minister of Information, Ye Htut, emphasises (personal communication, 17 April, 2017; Naung Oak & Brooten, 2019). Htaike Htaike (personal communication, 16 February, 2017), who monitors extreme speech online, points out a very symptomatic development in the media-society relationship, mainly impacted by a low media literacy, a bad education system and the leapfrogging of technological development levels: Media literacy is also a very important factor. I mean, in Myanmar, because we are a latecomer of people using Internet, people tend to believe everything that’s written on Facebook, and there are lots of people that thought Facebook is the Internet, and also think that Facebook is a media house like for example BBC or CNN. Thus, for most of Myanmar’s people the Internet equals Facebook. This is because Myanmar’s society did not have the chance to achieve new media literacy by step-by-step access to ICT11                                                                                                                         11 Myanmar’s society leapfrogged technological development levels such as the use of personal computers (PCs) and mobile phones due to a lack of availability and very high costs. Until recently landline communication was the only communication technology for the average people. It was mainly provided by street vendors and not part of regular households. Licenses for landline telephone connections, SIM cards, or PCs were only granted to people with government connections and not affordable for Myanmar’s general public. Since the political opening, the number of SIM card holders is skyrocketing and monthly spending on smartphone usage and mobile internet connections is very high compared to the still very low average income.   79 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 18, No.2