ISSUE: 2019 No. 36 ISSN 2335-6677 INTRODUCTION Facebook is the Internet in Myanmar. As of 31 January 2019, mobile phone subscription was at 105 per cent, meaning that many people have more than one SIM card. There were 21 million Internet users, amounting to 39 per cent of the population of approximately 54 million, all of them active Facebook users.1 In contrast, when the present political transition began in 2011, the country’s telecommunications sector was under state control, the Internet was a luxury, and there were only 500,000 Internet users, about 80 per cent of whom used Facebook.2 The number of Facebook users in Myanmar has grown about 53 times in eight years. On 7 February 2018, the President’s Office established a Social Media Monitoring Team “to protect the interests of the state and the people” from foreign people and organisations that might harm Myanmar.3 In October of the same year, Myo Yan Naung Thein, secretary of the Central Research Management Team of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), alleged that online trolls systematically defamed the party. Without specifying their identities or naming them, he said, “Those groups are the first to make comments under the posts of the news agencies. Once a news story relating to the government comes online, [they] instantly respond. They seek to shape public opinion and commentary. The team is big and has about 3,000 professional members who received their training abroad.”4 On 12 December, Deputy Minister of Transport and Communications Thar Oo told the upper house of the Myanmar Parliament that the government was preparing a cyber law.5 In January 2019, prominent investigative journalist and editor of Myanmar Now Swe Win warned of the spread of fake news online. “Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we make huge sacrifices to disseminate truth.”6 On 25 February 2019, Thein Tun Oo, spokesperson of the former ruling and now opposition Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), responded to widespread online defamation of the party by commenting, “We can’t say that those who call us thieves or the party of thieves are members of the public. In fact they operate as a team with international support and each of them opened several [Facebook] accounts. In fact they want to shape public opinion through the media.”7 2