Mobile Myanmar: The Impact of Social Media on Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar Fake news and hate speech While almost all young people in the current study had come across fake news stories on social media, few admitted to having shared or believed false information. In fact, some suggested that it was actually older adults with poor digital and media literacy who were mostly responsible for the spread of fake news. In contrast, many adults blamed the lack of critical thinking skills among young users. Interestingly, a recent study into fake news regarding the 2016 US election campaign found that the likelihood of sharing fake news stories increased with age (Guess, Nagler & Tucker, 2019), though it should be noted that no participants under 30 years were included in this study. More research is needed into the mechanisms behind the spread of fake news both in Myanmar and internationally, but it is likely to be primarily related to low digital and media literacy rather than age per se, which would explain the differing views between generations in Myanmar. The results of the current study support this hypothesis, with young people saying that they have become less susceptible to believing fake news (and less trusting of news overall) with more experience on social media, and it is users who are new to social media who are most likely to believe fake news. However, being able to identify fake news unfortunately does little to stop its spread. Fake news is more likely to be shared on social media than the truth (Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, 2018), and in Myanmar this often occurs inadvertently by commenting on the falsehood of such stories (McKay, 2017a). Young people from both Kayah State and Rakhine State were aware that it was often third parties systematically spreading these fake news stories to cause conflict between other groups for their own political gain, something that could be likened to the reported role of Russia in spreading fake news during the 2016 US election campaign (Badawy, Ferrara & Lerman, 2018). This suggests that while improving digital and media literacy is definitely important (for both young people and adults), tackling the proliferation of fake news across Myanmar requires a multi-pronged approach that includes both education and regulation, with Facebook needing to play a bigger and more effective role in responding to reports of fake news. This includes Facebook not only removing such stories and preventing their re-posting, but also proactively searching for content from these deleted posts that may have already been copied and pasted elsewhere. The finding that many young people in Myanmar respond to fake news by posting a ‘haha’ emoji could be used by Facebook to assist in flagging potential fake news stories for review. The overlap between fake news and hate speech means that encouraging culture change around tolerance and acceptance of people from different ethnicities (particularly Muslims who were the most common target of hate speech in the current study) will also be important going forward. While there was little awareness in the current study of existing anti-hate speech campaigns, young people believed that social media has a significant role to play in fostering peace and tolerance between different groups in Myanmar society. Given this and the fact that most young people in the current study were largely disengaged from and dismissive of fake news and hate speech targeting outgroups, there is significant opportunity to promote tolerance and diversity and to encourage connections between people from different cultures, through creative positive messaging that appeals to young people and capitalises on the popularity of sharing stories and videos that feature Myanmar celebrities and/or humour. Research into hate speech on social media is a relatively new area of investigation internationally. Most studies into hate speech to date have focused on automatic detection (Del Vigna, Cimino, Dell’Orletta, Petrocchi & Tesconi, 2017; Waseem & Hovy, 2016; Qian, ElSherief, Belding & Wang, 2018; Davidson, Warmsley, Macy & Weber, 2017; Badjatiya, Gupta, Gupta & Varma, 2017). However, the few studies into the prevalence of online hate speech estimate that it is widespread, with 40-70% of young people reporting being exposed to online hate speech, and 11-21% personally targeted (Netsafe, 2018; Oksanen, Hawdon, Holkeri, Näsi & Räsänen, 2014; Hawdon, Oksanen & Räsänen, 2014). The most prominent contexts for hate speech were sexual orientation, physical appearance and ethnicity, followed by political and religious views (Oksanen et al., 2014). Compared with these international findings, the qualitative findings of the current study suggest that hate speech is currently more prevalent in Myanmar than other countries. With the exception of sexual orientation, which was not identified by respondents in the current study, the most common contexts for hate speech in Myanmar (i.e., ethnicity, political and religious views) are fairly typical. A recent study by Hawdon et al. (2014) investigated hate speech across four countries with high digital uptake (Finland, Germany, the UK and the USA). It compared both the impact and recourse of consumers affected by online hate speech in each nation. While individuals across these countries responded differently to hate speech, each nation responded to victims’ calls for removal or protection from such messages in similar ways – through a regulatory body, 101