possible. On February 22, a day of extensive protests,
three local outlets broadcast 65 live video streams on
Facebook.207 Users have tried a range of tactics to
circumvent the military’s blocking efforts; VPNs and
secure communications tools have become widespread.
The maker of one secure communications app,
Bridgify, reported that it was downloaded over a
million times in Myanmar within the first two days
after the coup.208 The circumvention app Psiphon was
downloaded by nearly two million users during the
same period.209 Users benefited from foreign
counterparts’ recommendations regarding applications
that allowed them to chat anonymously or bypass
censorship, as prodemocracy activists within the
multinational grassroots protest movement known as
the Milk Tea Alliance shared their knowledge.210
The three-fingered salute previously used in
Thailand—a pillar of the Milk Tea Alliance—to signal
opposition to authoritarian rule has become massively
prevalent in Myanmar among supporters of the
democratic movement, both online and offline.211 In a
related development, support for the rights of
Rohingya people has increasingly become a feature of
the anticoup protest movement, as evidenced by
hundreds of thousands of users posting images of
themselves wearing black and holding up the threefinger salute with the hashtag “#Black4Rohingya” in
June 2021.212
regional military government ordered
telecommunications companies to disclose lists of
subscribers in order to identify who still had internet
access.213 A long list of surveillance tools from vendors
in countries including Canada, the United States,
Sweden, and Israel has been published by activists
reviewing government accounts (see C5).214 The
military has also reportedly submitted daily directives
to telecommunications companies, each of which
names hundreds of IP addresses to be blocked, in an
attempt to end the viability of VPN services (see C4).215
The government also impeded people’s ability to
protest for digital rights prior to the coup. Online
campaigning under the hashtag
#StopInternetShutdownMM was combined with offline
protests to call for an end to the service shutdowns in
Rakhine and Chin States.216 Eleven students and six
activists were arrested in February and June 2020,
respectively, for participating in peaceful offline
protests against the restrictions.217 One activist arrested
in June was fined 30,000 kyats ($22.50) that September
for hanging an antishutdown banner without
permission.218 Other forms of online protest—
including a 2018 campaign in which many users
changed their Facebook profile pictures to black spots
to protest the imprisonment of two journalists, and a
2017 #SayNOto66d campaign aiming to decriminalize
defamation—had also been prominent before the coup.
The military has tried to disrupt users’ ability to
circumvent its digital controls. On March 30, one
Free Expression Myanmar (FEM) and Freedom House - Freedom of the Net: Myanmar - အင်တာနက်ေပ*တွင် လွတ်လပ်မ/ - ြမန်မာ2ိ4င်ငံ - Page 17