Mobile Myanmar: The Impact of Social Media on Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS Summary of findings and key analysis points This research project has developed our understanding of the social media experiences of Myanmar young people living in Rakhine State and Kayah State, and the impact social media has on their daily lives. The FGDs, KIIs and survey have identified several common themes in the eight areas of interest for this study, which will be discussed here in turn. General usage More than half of the young people sampled in this study were heavy smartphone users, typically self-reporting between 1 and 5 hours use a day (about half of which was spent using social media). However, they perceived the amount of time that the average young person spends on their phone to be around 6 hours a day (adults perceived this to be higher at around 8 hours a day). Young Muslim IDP participants were the highest users of social media, likely due to their lack of education and vocational opportunities. Rural participants in Kayah state were the lowest users of social media, likely due to their longer work hours and lower disposal income to pay for phone credit. A common theme among both young people and adults was that young people use their phones whenever they are not working or studying, distracting them from other more active tasks and keeping them up late at night. Self-reported data from the survey supports this perception, however most young people did not think they spent too much time on social media themselves. Facebook was identified by the majority of participants as the most popular social media platform among young people. The main reasons for its popularity were accessibility to news and information and to connect with peers, most of whom use Facebook regularly. Notable exceptions were young Muslim girls living in IDP camps (who were restricted in their use of Facebook by religious and cultural norms), and some girls from rural Kayah villages, who preferred closed chat-based platforms such as Viber and WeChat. These less public platforms were popular among IDP respondents also. The platform IMO was used exclusively in IDP camps, where it was a popular app for communicating with relatives living overseas (as were WeChat and WhatsApp). IMO has similar functionality to other popular group chat-based platforms like Viber and WeChat, but with the ability for much larger group sizes (up to 100,000, compared to 500 for WeChat). Posting and sharing news and information was the most common reason for using social media. An interesting finding was that almost half of all respondents said that they share health tips online. The sharing of news about educational opportunities was also popular, particularly among urban and IDP respondents. Urban and Muslim IDP social media users were more likely to post about their life compared to rural users. Playing online games (especially with friends) was a popular social media function among boys, particularly in Rakhine State. Online safety The vast majority of both adults and young people believed that young people are not safe online, given the prevalence of online threats (such as scams, hacking and harassment) and a belief that young people typically do not think about their online safety or have the skills to protect themselves online. Accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers was a common occurrence. A common theme was that parents do not teach their children how to use social media safely because they typically do not use social media themselves and therefore do not fully understand online dangers, nor have the knowledge to teach their children digital safety tools and practices (some noted that educated adults were an exception to this). Instead, parents mostly tried to limit the amount of time their children (especially daughters) spend online as a safety measure. Some parents delayed their children’s access to smartphones and social media until after they had completed 94