2 The International Journal of Press/Politics 00(0) “Thone tat yin say, mathone tat yin bay” (Burmese saying “it will be medicine if you know how to use it, but it will be poison if you don’t know how to use it.”—a young woman in response to our question whether Myanmar is better off with or without Facebook) What happens when people in an emerging democracy with a history of ethnic conflict, colonialism, military rule, and media censorship suddenly gain access to Facebook? A U.N. Fact-Finding Mission, western media, and human rights groups have reported that Facebook was used to disseminate extreme speech1 and disinformation2 in Myanmar, thereby inciting violence against one of the country’s most vulnerable minority groups, the Rohingya (Mozur 2018; Stevenson 2018; UN 2018). But we know little about how people in Myanmar3 actually use Facebook, how they acquire and evaluate the information they find on the platform, and how they view Facebook’s role in inter-ethnic conflict. In this paper, we use interviews to address these questions. We find that people in Myanmar use Facebook for a variety of reasons and encounter many different information sources on the platform. Moreover, our research shows that Facebook users in Myanmar are aware of both social media’s advantages (diversity of opinions) and downfalls (extreme speech and disinformation). We also find, however, that the majority of people we interviewed engage in selective exposure and exhibit confirmation bias, for example, they disregard reports by the international media, and call their coverage of the Rohingya crisis biased. Moreover, most people do not exhibit effective fact-checking skills and rely on various heuristics instead. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what our findings mean in the debate surrounding Facebook’s role in the Rohingya crisis. In particular, we find that while Facebook did not create Myanmar’s communal divisions, it may have exacerbated them. Background Myanmar gained independence from Britain in 1948 and became a military dictatorship following a coup in 1962 to purportedly save the country from multiple armed insurgencies (Silverstein 1980). In 2016, fifty years of military rule came to an end and the National League for Democracy Party (NDL4) gained control, with Aung San Suu Kyi widely recognized as the de facto leader. Unfortunately, Myanmar’s transition toward democracy has been marred by communal violence—at a level and intensity never experienced under the previous military regime (Zin 2015). Myanmar is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse countries in the world, but not all ethnic and religious groups in the country enjoy equal political rights. The government is dominated by the Bamar Buddhists, the country’s linguistic and religious majority, comprising about two-thirds of the population (Thawnghmung 2011). Many ethnic minority groups have been marginalized under the Bamar’s exclusive control of the country’s civilian and military institutions and have engaged in armed conflict as a response (Smith 1991).