ISSUE: 2019 No. 36
ISSN 2335-6677
FACEBOOK AND HATE SPEECH
Myanmar faced a series of intercommunal, interreligious, or religiously framed violent
conflicts between Buddhists and Muslims from 2012 to 2017. The international community
and media have tended to portray the conflicts as being largely anti-Muslim phenomena
because the Muslim minority in the country has borne the brunt of violence in most, if not
all, instances. Many Buddhists have responded that this assessment was unfair because it
was usually cases of rape, murder, blasphemy and sexual harassment which ‘triggered’
conflicts. They contend that they must protect themselves from Islam and Muslims. This
discursive war has engendered rampant anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim hate speech. Ma Ba
Tha emerged in June 2013 to ‘protect’ Buddhism and Buddhists in Myanmar from the
alleged threat of Islam and Muslims. It became the major producer of and contributor to the
anti-Muslim hate campaign online and offline from 2013 to 2015.11
When this violence and its adverse impact on the social fabric of Myanmar almost derailed
the country’s transition, hate speech became a hot topic. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and
Myanmar civil society, with the backing of the international community, demanded more
effective and stronger rule of law, but these demands largely fell on deaf ears in the USDPled administration then in power.12
FAKE NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Ma Ba Tha continued to promote interreligious disharmony and challenge pluralism after
the NLD came to power in 2016. The ruling party therefore initiated a project to pass a hate
speech bill.13 Concurrently, the government took action against Ma Ba Tha by having it
banned in May 2017. 14 Ma Ba Tha rebranded itself as the Buddha Dhamma Parahita
Foundation. The NLD-appointed cabinet minister for religious affairs and culture Aung Ko
maintains that the new organisastion is illegal,15 although neither his ministry nor the NLD
government has sought further action.
Aung Ko’s ministry consequently became the target of deliberately propagated fake news
by Ma Ba Tha and its supporters on several occasions.16 He himself faced protests calling
for his resignation and for an apology for his crackdown on Ma Ba Tha.17 However, the
NLD government’s crackdown has rendered Ma Ba Tha insignificant or negligible. Perhaps
4