5/22/22, 5:59 PM How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar | WIRED Barack Obama and Myanmar's President Thein Sein shake hands before the East Asia Summit in Myanmar’s capitol, Naypyitaw, in November 2014. SOE ZEYA TUN/REUTERS One of Thein Sein’s most significant accomplishments was the liberalization of the country’s closed telecommunications sector, which had long been dominated by a state-owned monopoly. Under that regime, internet connectivity was severely limited and frustratingly slow. The country’s internet penetration was less than 1 percent in 2011 and there were just 1.3 million mobile subscribers, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations’ agency. This slowly began to change, and in 2012, mostly in major cities like Yangon and Mandalay, SIM card prices fell to hundreds of dollars from over a thousand, making them slightly more accessible though still out of reach to most. As internet connectivity expanded, so did social media. The state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper declared in 2013 that in Myanmar, “a person without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address.” Sonny Swe, the founder of the independent Myanmar Times newspaper who was jailed by the junta, says he was hit by a “digital tsunami” when he was released from prison during an amnesty in April 2013. He served more than eight years of his 14-year sentence, passing the time by speaking to spiders and other insects that crawled through his cell. “I named them individually and they all become my friends,” he would say later. Upon his release, he noticed two things—the heavier traffic choking the streets of Yangon and the widespread usage of mobile phones. His son helped him set up a Facebook page days after he was freed in the back of the newspaper’s aging offices. The digital transformation was poised to accelerate that year, when the government granted licenses to two foreign telecoms providers—Norway’s Telenor and and Qatar’s Ooredoo—ending the state monopoly. Ambitious connectivity targets included in the license agreements by the government ensured that the country’s internet use would skyrocket in coming years. When Telenor and Ooredoo launched operations in 2014, people queued for hours for SIM cards that cost around a dollar. Mobile shops https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ 8/16