However, to be able to report anything, one must first know that reporting is a real option.
Furthermore, one must know how to report the given content physically. And last, but not
least; one needs to actually disagree with the content and find it offensive enough to bother
taking action and not just scroll by it. None of these preconditions are self-evident in
Myanmar today, especially not the latter one. This is where the distinction between three
levels becomes useful. In reporting content all three levels are in play at the same time; the
third level with Facebook´s own guidelines and restrictions of what is acceptable and not, the
second national level where the government and military´s narrative is part of creating the
frame, and the last level where the sociality is performed and acted out. These three levels do
not always agree with each other, as we will see in the following case. The first level is here
represented by the Facebook users, who may take the role as ‘reporters’ and which normative
frames they perform within. This frame is a combination of the two other levels, as well as
whatever else is happening in people’s lives that would shape the context or the frame. This is
then the established norms, views, or “commonly accepted narrative” that is valid in the
process of choosing to report or not to report the content. Again; the given person needs to
find the content offensive enough to take action.
The Narrative of “The Land-Grabbing Bengali”
During my fieldwork, I was, more than once, taken a bit by surprise when the case of the
Rohingya was discussed. It was not common to discuss the crisis, at least not in the circles I
was socializing within or with me, as a foreigner. Reading about the conflict ahead of time, I
had read about “the Rohingya crisis”, now I was met with another perspective. When the few
exceptions occurred, and I could ask a bit about the conflict, I got the narrative of “the
Bengali”. One taxi driver explained the conflict to me as:
“The Bengali [locals often don´t say ‘Rohingya’, since they claim that the Muslim group is
originally from Bangladesh] is landgrabbers from Bangladesh that’s here to marry Buddhist
women and breed Muslim children. Eventually they will conquer the whole country and
destroy our culture.”
This was not an uncommon explanation, and it can be described as a very xenophobic view.
Human Rights Council reports that the government’s response to the hate speech spreading in
the Myanmar has been inadequate (HRC, 2018). More harshly represented is the military and
government in the Wired article. Wired writes that the military and government have been
amongst the most sophisticated users as use Facebook to forward their narrative out to the
public.(McLaughlin, 2018). As a result of all the information mentioned above, it is not hard
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