1/3/22, 11:44 AM Inside the origins of a conspiracy theory about Myanmar and China A BBC journalist shared images of the Chinese-language text seen by mobile customers in Myanmar. Image: Twitter, screenshot An investigation (https://twitter.com/hkcnews_com/status/1361731871525150720) by Hong Kong-based independent news outlet Citizen News found that the Chinese characters were likely the result of an encoding issue within the telecom providers’ system. Plugging the Chineselanguage SMS text into a tool used to decode UTF-8, the character encoding method most commonly used on the internet, returns the message, “Please enter a valid keyword.” You can even reverse engineer it using a character encoder/decoder tool (http://stringfunctions.com/encodedecode.aspx). An analysis (https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-disrupted-in-myanmar-amid-apparentmilitary-uprising-JBZrmlB6) by the monitoring service Netblocks also found that the Chinese characters were a side effect of the new internet restrictions (https://www.reuters.com/article/usmyanmar-politics-twitter-idCAKBN2A52DI), which affected the functioning of Google servers. A similar issue (https://9to5google.com/2020/06/09/google-fi-chinese-text/) occurred in June 2020, when Verizon customers reported receiving nonsensical messages in Chinese. The problem was that messages were being sent in UTF-8 encoding, but were decoded in the more complex UTF-16BE (https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/gzas28/sent_texts_being_received_in_chinese/ftf utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/inside-the-origins-of-a-conspiracy-theory-about-myanmar-and-china/ 4/8