Proportion of the targets in pro-military channels's content NLD student ethnic NUG/CRPH protester Armed civilian resistance CDM Ngyar's Local News Shwe yupar Oo Update News Myanmar Update News Myanmar National Post Ko Khant News 🇲🇲 A Frontier analysis of six of the most popular pro-military Telegram accounts found the main focus was civilian armed resistance, followed by ethnic armed groups. (Frontier) Coordinated behaviour Another example of this flow of bad actors from Facebook to Telegram is Ko Khant News. It has a Telegram channel with some 8,500 subscribers, as well as a private Facebook group under the same name. Identical content regularly appears on both platforms and one of the moderators, who is sometimes referred to as Ko Khant by other users, was implicated in a previous Frontier story for spreading false information about ethnic armed groups massacring civilian trainees. Frontier analysed 3,675 posts from six different pro-military Telegram accounts, including Shwe Yupar Oo and Ko Khant News, and found that the users’ main focus was civilian armed resistance, with 1,880 mentions, followed by ethnic armed groups, with 735 mentions. Frontier also found evidence that some of the accounts seemed to engage in coordinated behaviour – a channel called Myanmar Update News and another called Update News shared identical posts 63 times, for example. The outlets also regularly forward posts, including disinformation, from other pro-military accounts. For example, Ko Khant News forwarded a post from Update News that falsely claimed Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen had referred to junta chief Min Aung Hlaing as “prime minister”. It cited an article by the Phnom Penh Post, which had actually reported that Hun Sen called him chairman of the State Administration Council. Frontier also analysed the content that those six channels most frequently shared, finding that the military-run MWD News was shared the most frequently, with 103 posts. Facebook has taken a strong stance against disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behaviour since the Rohingya crisis in 2017, when it was heavily criticised for failing to combat hate speech and disinformation targeting the Muslim group. The platform introduced new policies specific to Myanmar before the November election and after the coup,and regularly releases reports on networks it has disrupted. But other social media platforms, like YouTube and TikTok, have been criticised for being less proactive in tackling hate speech and disinformation even as many of the same people facing restrictions and bans from Facebook migrate to those platforms.