This sample included Myanmar’s 15 largest outlets by Facebook audience size. The remaining 35 were carefully selected to represent the diversity of Myanmar’s media, including small regional and ethnic outlets, media established after the coup, Stateowned media, and military-aligned outlets, commonly known in Myanmar as “crony media”, thereby allowing for sector-wide generalisable findings. To measure the impact of the censorship, we compared data from the pre-coup period (January 2021) to the period surrounding the contested elections (October 2025 to January 2026). The data included posts, views, likes, shares, comments, and reactions, and was disaggregated across multiple dimensions of ownership, location, editorial stance, size, partisanship, and beat to compare changes between different types of media. This report focuses on the digital public square via Facebook, Myanmar’s primary social media platform for information exchange.1 While the dataset’s scale ensures statistical significance for digital trends, these findings describe the online ecosystem and should not be extrapolated to offline media audiences. Furthermore, while the dataset may include diaspora and exile use of Facebook, the size and consistency of the data mean that these external groups do not fundamentally alter the shifts. 2. Media output and operational resilience Despite a violent campaign to silence them, Myanmar’s media have shown resilience. Under international law, the media have the right to report, yet in Myanmar, the military regards journalism as a crime and prosecutes journalists. The data shows that the media have not retreated. Instead, they have expanded their exercise of the right to freedom of expression to reach the public. 2.1. Quantitative increases in news Since the 2021 coup, the combined number of Facebook posts by the 50 sampled outlets increased by +18% from 17 to 20 thousand posts per month.2 The median number of posts per outlet also increased by +64% from 185 to 299, showing that the growth was not limited to a few large outlets but was sector-wide. 1 The use of social media platforms is difficult to quantify. Social media usage data is based on potential access rather than actual or sustained access. Data on social media use is published by the platforms themselves, based on advertising opportunities, and may therefore be unreliable. 2 These figures have been adjusted to remove content that was repeatedly published. Approximately 5% of all media posts were duplicates of content that was previously posted. For a minority of media, the proportion of repeated posts was above 30%. The average for independent media was 5%. Page 6 of 24