Myanmar’s Military Struggles to Control the Virtual Battlefield Crisis Group Asia Report N°314, 18 May 2021 Page 2 Although affordable internet access brought many positive changes to Myanmar, the dark side of this rapid liberalisation was illustrated starkly after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked police outposts in northern Rakhine State in October 2016. The Tatmadaw responded with a brutal retaliatory campaign against both the group and the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority that lives in the region. Violence escalated in August 2017, with the military again employing appalling levels of indiscriminate force and driving mass displacement, and UN experts subsequently called for Tatmadaw leaders to be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.7 During this period, Facebook became a giant platform for hate speech directed at the Rohingya Muslim minority and, despite numerous warnings that such speech was appearing on its website dating back to at least 2013, the company had few mechanisms in place to counter Myanmar-language content; instead, it relied almost solely on local monitoring networks.8 Since then, Facebook has paid much closer attention to Myanmar, in particular by building its capacity to monitor vernacular content through human moderators and artificial intelligence.9 This experience informed its approach to Myanmar’s 2020 election, when the social network moved quickly to remove the relatively small amount of disinformation being posted to its platform.10 Since the coup, it has banned the Tatmadaw entirely, and removed military-controlled media outlets, including state broadcasters.11 If Facebook and other social media platforms have changed the way in which they work in Myanmar, the Tatmadaw has struggled to use the insights it has gained in recent years to develop more sophisticated tactics. In seeking to squelch online opposition following the February 2021 coup, it continues to rely heavily on the crude measures it used in targeting the Arakan Army in 2019 and 2020, notwithstanding their costs and limitations. This report examines how the military has sought to control internet access and use amid conflict in Myanmar since 2019. It is based on research conducted between October 2020 and April 2021 and builds on Crisis Group’s years of fieldwork and analysis on conflict dynamics in Myanmar.12 Given the constraints on travel due to COVID-19 and the military takeover during this period, the research was conducted 7 “Report of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar”, 12 September 2018. “How Facebook’s rise fueled chaos and confusion in Myanmar”, Wired, 6 July 2018. Testifying before the U.S. Congress in April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company needed to “do more” on Myanmar, outlining several steps it was taking to improve moderation of Myanmar-language content. For more, see “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing”, The Washington Post, 11 April 2018. 9 “Facebook turns to artificial intelligence to fight hate and misinformation in Myanmar”, The Washington Post, 16 August 2018. 10 Crisis Group interviews, social media researchers, November 2020 and March 2021. 11 “Myanmar military banned from Facebook and Instagram with immediate effect”, Facebook, 24 February 2021. 12 On the coup and subsequent events, see Crisis Group Asia Briefing N°166, Responding to the Myanmar Coup, 16 February 2021; Richard Horsey, “A Close-up View of Myanmar’s Leaderless Mass Protests”, Crisis Group Commentary, 26 February 2021; and Crisis Group Asia Briefing N°167, The Cost of the Coup: Myanmar Edges Toward State Collapse, 1 April 2021. On earlier events, see the citations throughout this report as well as Appendix C. 8