ISSUE: 2019 No. 36 ISSN 2335-6677 These statements point to the widely perceived gravity of the problem of fake news in Myanmar—or deliberate online falsehoods as Singapore calls them. The earlier years of the country’s ongoing transition, between 2012 and 2015, witnessed the emergence of largely anti-Muslim online and offline hate speech. Most political and social analyses and commentaries in those years therefore focused on hate speech and suggested legal and other means to combat it. While the NLD government worked on a hate speech bill after it came to power in 2016, it later shelved it. With the drastic decline in the influence of the anti-Muslim Ma Ba Tha (Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion) since 2017, online hate speech seemed to have become insignificant or negligible. Fake news or deliberate online falsehoods apparently became the more common phenomenon, at least in the eyes of the authorities. Consequently, concerns at the official level about Internet use have shifted to the abundance of fake news because this focus helps the NLD government to deny accusations of the continuing offline and online spread of anti-Rohingya hate speech, use the narrative of fake news as an excuse, and use and monitor social media. FACEBOOKING AND ITS PROBLEMS IN A MYANMAR IN TRANSITION Essentially, people use Facebook for two main reasons: the need to belong to a community, and the need for self-representation.8 On Facebook, people develop a sense of belonging and can also express themselves through producing and sharing posts, comments, pictures, and videos. Facebook also enables real-time communication between governments and politicians on the one hand and their people and constituents on the other.9 Social media also facilitates the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles in which partisan and polarized groups engage in selective exposure to facts and develop confirmation bias.10 The spread of fake news complicates further the use of Facebook for social and political purposes. How to regulate and sanction this is now at the top of the agenda of governments across the world. The problem is more severe in countries like Myanmar, where the rule of law is weak, political and social transition is the order of the day, and the government in power and its supporters themselves rely on Facebook for partisan political communication. 3