Athens Journal of Law July 2022 defence ministry with 49%.96 A further 28% are held by a conglomerate belonging to Myanmar’s military. 97 The remaining shares are held by a Myanmar consortium of 11 local companies.98 On 28 August and 18 December 2018, Facebook removed Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Facebook accounts, and Instagram accounts for coordinated inauthentic behaviour on Facebook.99 The sites were “seemingly independent news, entertainment, beauty and lifestyle pages”. 100 The pages were traced back to the Tatmadaw. Gleicher pointed out that: “[t]his kind of behaviour is not allowed on Facebook under our misrepresentation policy because we don’t want people or organisations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing […] . Our decision to remove these Pages was based on the behaviour of these actors rather than on the type of content they were posting. 101 The Tatmadaw True News Information Team Facebook page was set up in June 2020 “to provide ‘accurate news’ ahead of the November election”.102 In hindsight, the Tatmadaw was setting the scene for the military “to allege voter fraud as a pretext for the coup”. 103 Social Media and Non-State Actors Since 2009 the armed ethnic group the Arakan Army used sophisticated posts and videos on social media to promote its aim for “greater rights and autonomy for the Rakhine Buddhist community”. 104 It also used the platform for soliciting donations and recruiting new members. 105 Mobile internet and social media were also used for command and control and gathering intelligence. Facebook has had limited success in removing the sites as the Arakan Army obviously has highly skilled social media operatives. Reuters searched the internet and “found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook”. 106 Almost all of the posts were in Burmese. Some of the material had been “on Facebook for as long as six years”.107 In 2019 a copy of Radio Free Asia called Radio Free Myanmar (RFM) appeared. 108 Its role was to spread disinformation, usually about the NLD and the Rohingya Muslims. Frontier Myanmar also found that RFM operated “a network 96 Ibid. Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Gleicher (2018). 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Domino (2021, 20 April 2022). 103 Ibid. 104 International Crisis Group. (2021). 105 Ibid. 106 Stecklow (2018). 107 Ibid. 108 Banyan Kyaw, Phone Htet Naung, Beatson & Nachemson (2020). 97 319 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4150894

Select target paragraph3