Shaming Campaigns and a War of
Attrition
Photo: A semi-opened Mytel shop in downtown Yangon in August 2021 (Photo Courtesy of Mi-Kun)
The increasingly diverse social media landscape provides citizens with numerous ways of
communicating and expressing themselves, but also contributes to magnifying and displacing
the problem in a relentless multi-channel online war on information.
Parallel to their daily task of signaling abusive Facebook content, pro-democracy protesters
also began to focus on Tik Tok, which became the platform of choice for soldiers as it didn’t
initially respond to abusive and violent content. "In a video uploaded on TikTok, which gained
popularity in Myanmar during the COVID-19 pandemic, a man who is appearing to be a soldier,
warned his viewers to ‘protest peacefully’ or suffer the consequences. ‘We have to shoot this.
Not rubber bullets. See... real ones,’ he said while pulling out a loaded magazine from his rifle,"
VICE News reported. The company has since vowed to pull down such videos but local
informants state that they continue to spread widely.
A large number of channels promoting violence against protesters as well as ‘revenge porn’
have sprung up on Telegram, too. Numerous pages of ‘social punishment,’ which publish
victims’ addresses and other personal information and in some cases promoting sexual
assault, multiplied after the coup. In Myanmar, ‘revenge porn’ on the Internet dates back to
10