and discrimination during his sermons, for giving sermons for a year. The government steps demonstrated clear intent to tackle sources of hate offline and limit their ability to incite hatred, although a 2016 hate speech bill was shelved and has yet to be introduced in Parliament (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, 2019). The President’s Office also established a Social Media Monitoring Team in 2018 to “protect the interests of the state and the people”, but the emphasis of this team seems more to protect the state than the people. It is unclear what the team has done, but overall its impact seems to have been negligible to this point. The government also discussed their intention to prepare a cyber law, but the law has yet to be tabled in Parliament (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, 2019). While the NLD has made some significant responses offline, with some impact, their responses on-line have been limited. In some cases, this is due to the fact that hate speech and disinformation are emerging from government- or military-controlled accounts. In other cases, it may be that their capacity and political will to do so are limited. In 2014, the previous government had taken steps to report inflammatory content to Facebook in the wake of the Mandalay violence, only to discover that Facebook would remove content specifically highlighted by the Myanmar government, but had no ability themselves to review Burmese-language content (Reuters, 2018). There are other responses that have attempted to limit hate speech and disinformation, however, including those from Facebook itself. Facebook’s Responses to Hate Speech and Disinformation in Myanmar It is now generally recognized that Facebook was slow to respond to initial reports of its platform being used for hate speech and disinformation. Reuters reported that researchers and journalists were reporting incidents of hate speech to Facebook as early as 2013, including several detailed presentations in 2015 at Facebook headquarters on how Facebook was used as a platform for fomenting hate against Muslims. By 2014, however, Facebook had only one content reviewer who spoke Burmese and was based in Dublin. Facebook slowly added other content reviewers in Dublin and Manila (who later shifted to Malaysia), but fluency in Burmese and the sheer volumes of posts continued to be a problem, according to media reports (Reuters, 2018). 9

Select target paragraph3