ISSUE: 2019 No. 36 ISSN 2335-6677 for this reason, the NLD has shelved plans to pass a hate speech law, although it said in late 2017 that it would soon send the bill to Parliament.18 As things stand now, fake news has replaced hate speech as a more urgent problem for the government. On 8 November 2017, the NLD-dominated Parliament approved the formation of a body to monitor news online. Lower house NLD representative Ye Lwin said at the time, “Mobile phone usage has grown and spread across Myanmar since the political transformation in 2010. Usage of social media, Facebook, Viber, and Messenger has spread within the people in a short time. Consequently, wrong news, fake news, and fabricated news have penetrated into the people and undesirable political, social, and economic results have occurred.”19 Minister for transportation and communications Thant Sin Maung agreed: “Attempts to blacken the name of individuals or organizations or instigate racial and religious sentiments disrupt law and order and destabilize the country.”20 The government formed the Social Media Monitoring Team (SMMT) in February 2018 through an expenditure of MMK 6,426 million (approx. USD 4.5 million). But reports on its day-to-day activity and on its impact on the dissemination of fake news and hate speech are not publicly available yet. When the opposition USDP challenged the conduct of the SMMT in a session of the lower house on 11 November 2018, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications responded that the SMMT only used open-source intelligence and conducted social media analytics, without detailing the process and impact.21 FACEBOOK AND THE ROHINGYA CRISIS Although the Myanmar government, civil society, and the international community had been concerned with rampant hate speech on Facebook in 2012-15, none of them explicitly held the company accountable. However, the colossal refugee crisis from August 2017 onwards changed matters. The crisis followed the Myanmar military’s clearance operation against the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which the NLD government branded a terrorist organization on 25 August 2017. 22 As this crisis unfolded, United Nations human rights experts and investigators Yanghee Lee and Marzuki Darusman explicitly called on Facebook to deal with the use of the platform as a tool in a coordinated hate campaign against the Rohingya.23 5