9/24/21, 8:28 PM
A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military
By Paul Mozur
Oct. 15, 2018
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — They posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes as they flooded Facebook with their
hatred. One said Islam was a global threat to Buddhism. Another shared a false story about the rape of a Buddhist
woman by a Muslim man.
The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel
who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers and
civilian officials in the country.
Members of the Myanmar military were the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that
stretched back half a decade and that targeted the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, the people
said. The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the
country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Human rights
groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in
recent history.
While Facebook took down the official accounts of senior Myanmar military leaders in August, the breadth and
details of the propaganda campaign — which was hidden behind fake names and sham accounts — went undetected.
The campaign, described by five people who asked for anonymity because they feared for their safety, included
hundreds of military personnel who created troll accounts and news and celebrity pages on Facebook and then
flooded them with incendiary comments and posts timed for peak viewership.
Working in shifts out of bases clustered in foothills near the capital, Naypyidaw, officers were also tasked with
collecting intelligence on popular accounts and criticizing posts unfavorable to the military, the people said. So
secretive were the operations that all but top leaders had to check their phones at the door.
Facebook confirmed many of the details about the shadowy, military-driven campaign. The company’s head of
cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said it had found “clear and deliberate attempts to covertly spread
propaganda that were directly linked to the Myanmar military.”
On Monday, after questions from The New York Times, it said it had taken down a series of accounts that supposedly
were focused on entertainment but were instead tied to the military. Those accounts had 1.3 million followers.
“We discovered that these seemingly independent entertainment, beauty and informational pages were linked to the
Myanmar military,” the company said in its announcement.
The previously unreported actions by Myanmar’s military on Facebook are among the first examples of an
authoritarian government’s using the social network against its own people. It is another facet of the disruptive
disinformation campaigns that are unfolding on the site. In the past, state-backed Russians and Iranians spread
divisive and inflammatory messages through Facebook to people in other countries. In the United States, some
domestic groups have now adopted similar tactics ahead of the midterm elections.
“The military has gotten a lot of benefit from Facebook,” said Thet Swe Win, founder of Synergy, a group that focuses
on fostering social harmony in Myanmar. “I wouldn’t say Facebook is directly involved in the ethnic cleansing, but
there is a responsibility they had to take proper actions to avoid becoming an instigator of genocide.”
In August, after months of reports about anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook, the company acknowledged that it
had been too slow to act in Myanmar. By then, more than 700,000 Rohingya had fled the country in a year, in what
United Nations officials called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The company has said it is bolstering its
efforts to stop such abuses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
1/3