Myanmar’s Other Battlefield: Social Media

Last month, a group of United Nations experts issued a clear call to the world’s largest social media companies: Stop letting Myanmar’s military use your platforms to advance its interests. In a statement issued on March 13, the U.N. experts said that the military government, which seized power in February 2021, “is orchestrating an online campaign of terror and weaponizing social media platforms to crush democratic opposition.”

“Online rhetoric has spilled into real world terror, with military supporters using social media to harass and incite violence against pro-democracy activists and human rights defenders,” said the experts, which included Thomas Andrews, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for Myanmar, as well as a host of other special rapporteurs for issues including human rights, freedom of expression, corporate social responsibility, and violence against women and girls.

In particular, the experts said, women activists had been “targeted and severely harmed” after being “doxxed" – i.e. having their names, addresses, and other personal information published online, with the aim of exposing them to real world attacks.

Social media and messaging apps have become a key battleground in Myanmar since the coup d’etat, running in parallel to the armed struggle between the military administration and its multifarious opponents. 

While previous concerns about social media in Myanmar have focused mostly on Facebook – issues that have been at least acknowledged by the social media behemoth and its parent company Meta – the U.N. experts singled out the messaging app Telegram, which it said had become a “hotbed of pro-military activity.”

“Since the coup, pro-junta actors have taken advantage of Telegram's lax approach to content moderation and gaps in its terms of service,” the experts said. “They have attracted tens of thousands of followers by posting violent and misogynistic content.”

Social media has played an outsized and pernicious role in Myanmar’s recent troubles, reflecting its sudden arrival and central importance to the country’s informational ecosystem. In particular, Facebook, which appeared overnight with the sudden availability of cheap mobile SIM cards in mid-2014 and for many local users was thus nearly synonymous with “the internet,” was accused of amplifying the sectarian tensions that scarred Myanmar’s decade of limited political opening.

Facebook’s role in enabling the military’s ethnic cleansing – and possible genocide – of the Rohingya population of western Myanmar in August 2017 is well attested. In March 2018, a U.N. fact-finding mission reported that that social media platforms, Facebook chief among them, had played a “determining role” in the violence against the Rohingya, and had “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict” in the country ahead of their expulsion.

In a report published last year, the rights group Amnesty International even called on Meta to pay reparations to Rohingya communities who were driven into eastern Bangladesh, where around 1 million remain in massive refugee camps. The company’s “dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit… substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017,” it alleged.

In a worrying echo, the U.N.’s more recent statement noted that “doxxed” women have also been accused of having sexual relations with Muslim men or supporting the Muslim population – an ultranationalist trope that accompanied anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya attacks in the 2010s.

The experts said Telegram needed to do more to “ensure that their services do not contribute to human rights abuses, including gender-based violence and discrimination, arbitrary arrest, the right to privacy, and the suppression of freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, both online and offline, and association.”

According to the U.N. statement, when Telegram was informed of the military’s use of its platform, it blocked “at least 13” pro-military accounts. But one of the worst accounts was back online shortly after, and the experts predicted, probably correctly, that unless Telegram “fundamentally changes” the way it moderates content, new accounts will simply mushroom up to exploit the app’s existing blind spots.

The fact that Myanmar’s military is still exploiting social media platforms, even after its past abuse of these technologies has been documented in such detail, suggests a number of things. First, since digital technology is one of the main ways in which resistance forces are communicating with themselves and the wider world, it is entirely unsurprising that the military junta would seek to blunt their impact, while using these same tools for its own ends. What is surprising is that tech companies operating in the country have not taken this for granted, and acted accordingly.

Second, there is little reason to believe that the sheer volume of abusive or hateful content on these social media platforms can be effectively contained without significant structural changes to the business models underpinning them. As Amnesty claimed in the aforementioned report, Meta’s role was “not merely that of a passive and neutral platform that responded inadequately in the face of an unprecedented crisis… In reality, Meta’s content-shaping algorithms” – tuned to boost advertising revenue – “proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya.”

Third, it shows the extent to which digital technology is in a constant state of forward motion. Should content moderation become too effective in weeding out targeted content, there will always be a new tool with less stringent controls that political actors, whether democrats or autocrats, can easily adopt.

All of this suggests a wrenching ethical dilemma for any technology companies whose products are used in Myanmar. To withdraw from the country is no solution; it would merely deprive the country’s resistance fighters of tools that are useful – indeed, vital – to their struggle. But to stay confronts companies with the need to establish vigilant moderation standards and a deep reservoir of local knowledge in a country whose market is unlikely to be particularly important to the bottom line. Whether any firm has either the will or the ability to strike this balance remains to be seen.