1. Introduction
The country of Myanmar is facing not only political and social chaos but also
many challenges after the coup. Hate speech becomes a major challenge
among those problems. People in Myanmar have become victims of historic
disaffection, social tensions among different ethnicities, and power dynamics.
Hate speech also becomes a big challenge to national harmony and social
stability.
Myanmar consists of different states and regions with diverse cultures and
different ethnicities. Those differences were used as a source to spread hate
speech. This hate speech includes words that can incite terrorism,
discrimination, and aggressiveness among residents with different religions
and ethnicities.
The Myanmar military creates fear and aggressiveness to destroy the stability
of democratic administration and human rights so that they can keep their
power longer. If the public can understand the source and spreading
mechanism of hate speech, this problem can be solved better. The objective
of this report is not only to do documentation and analysis of hate speech but
also to support that civil society organizations and international communities
are able to tackle hate speech better.
2. Research Methodology
As hate speech is a term that comes from emotion, there is a wide spectrum in
defining it, not a specific one. BHRN, therefore, standardized the definition of hate
speech for this report as follows. Hate speech in this report means aggressiveness
and hatred against protected characteristics of a person or a group, blaming,
discriminative expression, writing, gesture, or art expression of excoriation, or
dehumanization.
It means attacking someone’s faith, language, gender, sexual orientation, origin,
ethnicity, skin color, race, belief, citizenship, and physical appearance. The
monitored hate speeches were categorized as (1) Criminalizing Hate Speech, (2)