The Curse of a Facebook Nation Life online came with downsides and dangers. When the Internet was finally introduced to Myanmar, it came without proper guardrails or governance. That proved devastating in a context of overall minimal education, digital literacy and sociopolitical tension. In Myanmar, for many, Facebook is the Internet. Facebook is also the new tea shop, a place where people used to meet and chat about current events during earlier eras of dictatorship. The Melbourne Asia Review puts this in context: "Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ initiative in the developing world and partnerships with telecommunications providers such as Telenor helped fuel Facebook’s extraordinary expansion. After its entry in 2014, Telenor offered a deal where customers could use Facebook on their mobile device without any data charges. Importantly, as Internet connectivity was expanding, the quality of connections remained poor, but in this early phase of expansion, Facebook loaded better than other platforms. Lastly, Facebook established deals with manufacturers and retailers to have their application preloaded onto Burmese mobile phones." In 2021, Facebook's user base in Myanmar amounted to approximately 28 million users, which represents half of the population, and remains a primary source of news for most. Of a hundred Internet users interviewed by the authors in September 2021, the Facebook application remained the sole use of and gate to the web for 80% of the users. Its pervasiveness, combined with absent governance (State or corporate), unregulated and unchecked content, and algorithms that elevate the most arousing posts made Facebook a predictable weapon in the crimes committed against the Rohingya community. In a CBS documentary, whistleblower Frances Haugen denounced the responsibility of Meta (formerly Facebook) for “tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.” For years, ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu incited violence against Muslims, and more specifically against the Rohingya, on his pages followed by half a million people. The consequences of the viral circulation of inflammatory posts by religious and military leaders on existing tensions got very real during the ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya community from October 2016 onwards. Over a million people from the Muslim community have been forced to flee to other countries. A study by the Ontario International Development Agency estimated in January 2018 that 115,000 Rohingya were beaten, 35,000 were thrown into fires by the Burmese military and local Buddhist Rakhine civilians. They also killed 24,800 people, perpetrated gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against 18,500 women and adolescents. Following Facebook’s admission in 2018 that its platform was being used to “foment division and incite offline violence,” Gambia filed an application for discovery in June 2020 with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The application aimed to compel Facebook to disclose information related to the personal Facebook accounts of Myanmar officials, which the court ordered the social media giant to do in September 2021. Meta appealed the decision, 7