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… The liberalisation of the Myanmar economy and easing of Western sanctions after 2011, which allowed the entry of Facebook, also coincided with liberalisation in freedoms of speech and association in Myanmar. Public debate about social issues, which had been smothered for decades by rigid military authoritarianism, began anew in Myanmar’s print media, online, and in teashops around the country. On one hand this allowed new political associations such as labor and environmental movements to flourish. But there was a widespread perception amongst the majority Burman population of a ‘Muslim threat’. The presence of Muslim majority countries in Myanmar’s region, and a perceived growth in Muslim populations within Myanmar, especially in Rakhine State, contributed to fears for ‘race and religion’, and therefore the future existence of the Burman and predominantly Buddhist population of Myanmar. Leading into Facebook’s rapid penetration into the Burmese market, there were no indications that the company considered in any capacity the impact its platform would have on Burmese society. And as the number of Facebook users grew to the millions, there were clear warnings for the company that the platform was facilitating hate speech against Muslims. As early as 2013 Myanmar Deputy Minister for Information, U Ye Htut, reflected that Facebook spreads ‘gunpowder’ through the country through rumors and the proliferation of hate speech. Following incidents of violence in 2014, civil society groups, researchers and tech entrepreneurs communicated with Facebook officials a number of times, stressing the widespread use of the platform for hate speech, especially through fake accounts. One specific example of a post on the platform that was identified for Facebook by civil society groups said, ‘We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs’. Despite these criticisms, by 2015 Facebook still had virtually no capacity for identifying hate speech on its platform in Myanmar, either through natural language processing or through human analysts. In 2015, Facebook had only two Burmese speaking analysts dealing millions of daily posts in Burmese language. This meant that most of the identification of hate speech on the platform relied on Burmese Facebook users themselves. As military and civilian violence against Muslims in Myanmar reached a peak in 2016 and 2017, hate speech on Facebook proliferated. Attacks by an insurgent group in Rakhine state in October 2016 led to major reprisals against Muslim communities, primarily led by the Burmese military. A year later another insurgent attack on police stations in Rakhine state led to even more widespread and violent military operations against Muslim communities which ultimately displaced almost one million people from Rakhine state to neighbouring Bangladesh. Propelled especially by sermons from prominent monks such as Ashin Wirathu, Burmese language anti Muslim hate speech spread widely online. 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… 5/12