5/27/22, 2:20 AM How activists are using Facebook in Myanmar for democratic ends, but Facebook itself also facilitated hate speech | LSE So… Using Facebook for resistance following the 2021 Myanmar coup In the early hours of February 1, 2021, Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Nyint and many other National League for Democracy (NLD) Members of Parliament were arrested by the Burmese military. A statement from the military declared that power had been transferred to commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and that the country would be under a state of emergency for the next 12 months. New so-called ‘free and fair elections’ would take place due to claims of fraud and so-called ‘huge irregularities’ in the NLD’s landslide election victory in November 2020. The military coup sparked immediate resistance from Burmese political parties, civil society groups, and citizens from all over Myanmar. An NLD statement under Aung San Suu Kyi’s name, released a day after the coup, urged people ‘not to accept this, to respond and wholeheartedly to protest against the coup by the military’. Large scale street protests began in all major cities, with protesters using a three finger salute of resistance inspired by the book The Hunger Games. A broad civil disobedience movement also emerged, with government-employed doctors, engineers, academics and civil servants refusing to work under the new regime. Despite escalating violent military crackdowns through late February and March—with thousands of arrests and hundreds of civilians killed—the protests continued in major cities. In the weeks following the coup, protestors and activist networks made wide use of Facebook as a platform for mutual encouragement, information sharing and news updates. After 19-year-old Kyal Sin was shot dead while protesting in Yangon in early March, photos of her had millions of views on Facebook. On the day of her death she was wearing a t-shirt saying ‘Everything will be OK’. As photographs of her spread on Facebook, there were thousands of comments supporting the protesters and overall resistance to the coup. In the early weeks of the protests, photographs of others who had been arrested, wounded or killed in the crackdown were also widely shared. Facebook posts from protesters used humorous references to international pop culture while others contained practical advice, for example on protest tactics or how to safely carry wounded people. Some posts personally identified and shamed individual police officers who had been involved in the crackdown, while others urged government workers to join the emerging civil disobedience movement. With such widespread activity on Facebook, the Myanmar military began to identify and seek the arrest of opposition Facebook users and attempted to block all social media use. This did not stop users however, who made creative use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to continue accessing the platform. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/seac/2021/06/23/how-activists-are-using-facebook-in-myanmar-for-democratic-ends-but-facebook-itself-also-facilitated-hat… 3/12