Mobile Myanmar: The Impact of Social Media on Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar Panzagar / ‘Flower Speech’ Panzagar is probably the highest profile example of a coordinated home-grown campaign to tackle hate speech in Myanmar. Founded in 2014 by activists including former political prisoners, it began as an offline campaign using peaceful protest to highlight the real-world impacts of using hate speech. Campaigners would actively counter-rally against nationalist organisations in the streets of Myanmar’s major cities, and due to growing support across the country the decision was made to move it online. Working directly with Facebook, Panzagar developed stickers for people to share across the platform, with Facebook able to provide statistics on their use. In one year, February 2015-2016, they received 2.7 million downloads – and even more impressively the stickers were used 12.9 million times in messages (Davis, 2017). Although the key personalities have now moved on, some of the core mission is continued by The Seagull Foundation (The Seagull Foundation, 2018) and the Panzagar Facebook page, which has more than 210,000 followers (Panzagar, 2018). ‘Think Before You Trust’ – Burma Monitor Burma Monitor was founded in 2017 as part of the Phandeeyar ‘Tech for Peace’ incubator, with the goal of raising awareness of how to spot and dissect ‘fake news’ online. The Burma Monitor team of Yangon-based activists and developers started an online campaign under the ‘Think Before You Trust’ brand. It began by uploading examples of fake news the team had spotted online, and debunking it via fact-checking or photo analysis. The team collated lessons for its growing community of followers on how to spot fake news or fabricated photos, with advice on what to do when they found it. Over time its community of followers began to submit examples of dubious content for the team to dissect and verify. Phandeeyar’s end-line assessment of the campaign highlighted it as a particularly successful campaign when compared with its cohort peers, particularly in engaging young people – 94% of its Facebook fans were between the ages of 18 and 34 (McKay, 2017b). The Facebook page remains active with over 65,000 likes (Think Before You Trust, 2019), and has an accompanying website (although this appears less popular with users). Myanmar ICT for Development Organisation (MIDO) Started by one of the founders of the Panzagar campaign, in 2016 MIDO, through its Safe Online Spaces (SOS) initiative, began monitoring Facebook for what it has defined as six indicators of hate speech: threats, accusations, dehumanisation, encouragement of violence, bullying and harassment. It developed a training workshop which it deployed at dozens of locations across the country in early 2016 to educate people on Facebook privacy, digital security, news literacy and assessing accurate news sources (Aung, 2016). Its more recent work has been in partnership with the Oxford University Myanmar Media and Society Project, where it has been working to develop ‘Peace Memories’ – oral histories of how in the past different religious communities had lived together peacefully in Myanmar, which can then be shared online to counter divisive narratives (Walton, Schissler, & Thi, 2017). The Impact of Freedom of Expression, Religion and Belief: Measuring results through online initiatives This was a joint initiative led by SFCG with its local partner, MIDO, to build on the previous work of both organisations in this space, of which the above referenced stakeholder mapping was part. Its goal was to support local organizations to better quantify and demonstrate the impact of their work combating the negative influences of hate speech online. Through three two-day design labs to measure the effects of hate speech, they brought together 23 local organisations working on this area to produce a collaboratively designed toolkit and user guide for monitoring and evaluation of the impact of counter hate speech. The toolkit is now being applied by local organisations (Search for Common Ground, 2018). 20