In Myanmar, social media is already extremely popular. One regional marketing company, for example, identifies 1,240,000 Facebook users in the country (We Are Social 2014: 132). If the current estimate that approximately one per cent of the population has access to the Internet is accurate, this would represent more than two Facebook accounts for every Internet user in Myanmar. The messaging application known as Viber, meanwhile, boasts an even wider user base in Myanmar at five million users (Millward 2014). Underscoring the popularity of social media, Facebook is already used as a communication platform for government leaders and politicians, civil society, the private sector, and journalists. Government departments including the office of Myanmar’s President regularly issue information and statements via Facebook. The President’s spokesperson is known as the ‘Facebook Minister,’ for example, and winners of bids for offshore oil and gas concessions were recently announced by a ministerial Facebook status update. It is no wonder then that Myanmar journalists often scoop stories by trawling their newsfeeds. Even Myanmar’s monastic community, which lives an otherwise ascetic life, uses social media to access and disseminate information. At an event I attended to discuss harmony between religious communities, for example, a Buddhist leader criticised American diplomats in attendance for bias in their criticisms regarding religious violence. ‘I also follow the US Embassy Facebook page,’ the monk said to those assembled. ‘One month ago, the US embassy issued the statement regarding the attack on a mosque, without confirming the information. But I was very sorry not to see a statement issued regarding the attack on a very dutiful soldier in Rakhine State’ (Schissler 2014a). A few chairs to his left sat U Wirathu, the religious leader whose Facebook posts have been credited with sparking the riots in Mandalay during July. In March 2014, U Wirathu had 29,958 followers on Facebook and was leading ‘media trainings’ to instruct attendees in how to use social media (Long 2014). There are perhaps deceptively simple technological reasons for why Facebook may become particularly popular in Myanmar, unlike in China with its diversity of social media platforms (Fong 2012). Facebook can be installed on phones and tablets by users and phone shops, to be easily mastered by people not otherwise familiar with using the Internet to search for news and information. In a country where the speed of Internet connectivity can be infuriatingly slow, the standalone Facebook apps on mobile devices will often load when other sites will not. Perhaps most important for Burmese language users, it is relatively easy to use and read Burmese script on Facebook, an issue that has long plagued users of SMS messaging, email, and even word processing software. Twitter, conversely, does not lend itself as well to use in Myanmar language, at least at the present moment. Those who have experienced the frustration of waiting for an Internet page to load in Myanmar, or the bewildering helplessness of trying to read a Burmese language page or document without Unicode or the correct fonts installed7, will know these are sufficiently compelling technological factors to determine choice of platform. These issues are being rapidly addressed, but it may not matter; if Facebook is already the platform where all your friends are, it is reasonable to assume that you, too, will join them there. Even more so if the company pursues special arrangements with mobile network providers to enable users to access Facebook without incurring any extra charges or requiring a data plan, as it has in other emerging markets (Deibert 2013). 7 The process of making the Myanmar alphabet legible electronically has been an inconsistent one, and as of 2014 the majority of users continued to use font-based approaches rather than Unicode, creating a mishmash of legibility that technology companies have yet to resolve. 4