International Journal of Communication 13(2019) Extreme Speech in Myanmar 3209 in Myanmar until 2017—has meant that many Internet users in Myanmar do not see the Internet as existing much beyond tools like Facebook. The impact of the Internet’s arrival on the country was evident in the way people often consumed news uncritically using online social media, which had significant political consequences (Lee, 2016, 2018). During my research in Myanmar, it was common to find mobile phone users who did not understand that the Internet existed beyond what was available to them through preloaded social media applications, as they had their social media accounts set up for them by staff at a mobile phone shop. Myanmar’s media liberalization has come with some undesirable consequences. Political and media freedoms have provided chances for divisive voices to foment ethnic and religious conflict that in the past had been suppressed by Myanmar’s military-led government (Holland, 2014). In 2015, journalists in Myanmar frequently told me their concerns about the power of social media and particularly of Facebook. One foreign journalist who had worked extensively in Myanmar and the region, whom I interviewed in 2015, told me that since Myanmar’s telecommunications sector had been liberalized, social media had become “incredibly influential”: Some people use it as their primary news source. In fact, a lot of people use it as their primary news source now. You speak to a lot of people and they say they don’t know what the Internet is, they just know Facebook. And so, everything that they learn about what’s going on in the country is coming from Facebook. Obviously, a lot of people still do read newspapers, but Facebook is the primary source of information for a lot of people now . . . which is terrible because a lot of what’s going on Facebook is wrong and rumour ridden . . . It’s proliferating a narrative which is false. (personal interview, December 1, 2015) Nationalist Buddhist groups including the staunchly anti-Muslim 969 Movement and the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, known as the Ma Ba Tha, used new media and political freedoms to pursue anti-ethnic minority and anti-Muslim political agendas, including advocating policy changes that aim to severely curtail the rights of ethnic and religious minorities (Fisher, 2015). Nationalist leaders often use provocative and extreme language to make their political case. Buddhist monk and prominent Ma Ba Tha leader Wirathu, who was sentenced to a 25-year prison sentence by the country’s military-led government for inciting religious hatred but was released during an amnesty for political prisoners in 2012, said, “In every town, there is a crude and savage Muslim majority,” and he warned about Muslims who “target innocent young Burmese girls and rape them” (Hodal, 2013, paras. 2, 5). Wirathu said that “Muslims are like the African carp. They breed quickly, and they are very violent and they eat their own kind. Even though they are minorities here, we are suffering under the burden they bring us” (Tin Aung Kyaw, 2013, para. 3). In 2013, Wirathu was described in a 2013 TIME cover story as the “Face of Buddhist Terror,” and human rights groups accused his anti-Muslim rhetoric of inciting anti-Muslim violence and contributing to the exclusion of Muslims from the political mainstream (Beech, 2013). Wirathu was a rigorous user of social media, especially Facebook, regularly making inflammatory posts to his more than 500,000 followers, and on a number of occasions Wirathu’s posts have been removed or his accounts frozen by Facebook, and it was reported he was permanently removed from Facebook in early 2018 (Barron,