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Policy Brief No. 78
Toda Peace Institute
Use of Facebook Ads: Besides using pages and groups to target their audience, both the
military and Ma Ba Tha have been found to make use of Facebook’s boosting and ad
features, which allow for the micro-targeting of audience by location, age, gender and a
range of interests and behaviour patterns.
Examples of sponsored content by official pages from Ma Ba Tha and the Military
Leveraging of Facebook Messenger: In addition to leveraging the Facebook main platform, civil society believes that the military experimented with Facebook messenger as
part of its effort to spread fear and incite violence. The most famous example of such
use was the circulation of parallel rumours of imminent attacks in September 2017,
which appear to have been designed to ignite violence between Muslim and Buddhist
communities while the military crackdown was underway in Northern Rakhine. These