Mobile Myanmar: The Impact of Social Media on Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar Research into Myanmar Facebook use (unpublished) Organisation/Author: Melyn McKay for Phandeeyar Date: October 2017 Relevance: This as-yet unpublished report (McKay, 2017a) has strong relevance to the scoping study. Phandeeyar set out to explore Facebook use and behaviours among a population sample roughly reflecting that of Myanmar, with a focus on how people in real-time respond to online material deemed ‘hate speech’. Methodologically it also moved beyond earlier studies which have focused on simply asking respondents to describe their social media behaviour. Instead Phandeeyar created a practical simulation to observe research participants mid-use. The results provide rich and detailed insights into the idiosyncrasies of Facebook (and broader social media) use in Myanmar. The findings from this research were used to develop a second study on ‘digital cultures’ (Oo & Thant, 2019), which was to conducted by Phandeeyar in 2018.This study looked more specifically at digital use, content preferences, and online safety. Methodology and limitations: Around 70 participants were included in the study from four areas with the highest concentrations of users – Yangon, Mandalay, Monywa and Taunggyi. A dummy Facebook profile was created by Phandeeyar and populated with shared content from around the web. Specifically, the profile included current events news, posts from noted extremists, fake news sites, and entertainment news. The Focus Groups Discussion (FGD) participants were first asked to log into their own Facebook accounts in order to observe the way they interacted with the app or page itself. Phandeeyar noted that its study was limited by its small sample size, and the brevity of its FGDs (2.5 hours). Its ambition for a diverse sample were in some cases skewed by age, professional, and educational background in the make-up of its FGDs. While it was able to gain a closer insight to ‘real-life’ social media behaviour, there were still concerns about participants demonstrating social desirability bias in the FGDs. The second study (Oo & Thant, 2019) included 23 focus 137 participants in five locations including Hlaing Thar Yar, Yangon, Meikhtila, Taunggyi, Kalay, and Hpa’an. As before, Phandeeyar’s team of researchers conducted FGDs which included observation periods that enabled the researchers to ask questions about real-time behaviors. Though larger in scale, the study otherwise used many of the same selection methods and was thus subject to the preceding study’s limitations. Key findings: Despite these limitations, both studies provide granular and relevant insights for the current study. As well as providing some useful headline statistics on usage time and network size, the studies looked at a range of relevant issues including: where people went for news; how respondents assessed the credibility of popular sources of news; how respondents engaged with content; and how they used Facebook tools (reactions, emojis, GIFs, etc.) specifically to express nuanced reactions. One of the most interesting findings, to this regard, is a noted preference for trusting individuals over organisations – e.g., participants were more likely to trust posts found on a journalist’s personal profile than news articles posted by a mainstream newspaper. The first study also identified patterns of behaviour linked to age, gender, educational background, and location and posited a number of typical Facebook ‘Personas’ to be found in Myanmar. Phandeeyar found localised differences in how people decide which information to trust, which often reflected pre-social media practice in those areas. For example, in more provincial locations (Taunggyi/Monywa), the Facebook pages of local journalists were particularly prominent and trusted sources of news. In the past in these towns, people would check local rumours with local journalists in their personal networks – this function has now migrated online, with Facebook pages of local journalists being popular places to go to see if something is credible or not. However, Phandeeyar also reported that the traditional offline method of contacting journalists personally was still a popular means of rumour validation. Of considerable importance was its identification of ‘hate speech fatigue’ – a phenomenon describing the apathy resulting from the sheer volume of hate speech material encountered online. Rather than challenging, reporting or blocking such content, some respondents simply ignored it or mocked it by reacting with a ‘haha’ emoji – which unfortunately works to increase the offending post’s visibility vis-à-vis the Facebook algorithm. The second study identified apps – beyond Facebook – that were commonly in use. For instance, file-sharing apps, which allow users to download content for offline use, were extremely popular among younger participants. The study also found conflicting views on the benefits of digital learning. On the one hand, parents generally restricted children 15