“Technology is like a bomb in Myanmar.” —Kyaw Kyaw, frontman of Burmese punk band Rebel Riot 1
Back in early July, I started working on a quick series of posts about online structures of refuge and exposure. In a draft of what I meant to be the second post in the series, I tried to write a tight two or three paragraphs about the role Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and why it made me dubious about Threads. Over time, those two or three paragraphs turned into a long summary, then a detailed timeline, then an unholy hybrid of blog post and research paper.
What I learned in the process was so starkly awful that I finally set the whole series aside for a while until I could do a lot more reading and write something more substantial. Nearly three months later, I’m ready to share my notes.
Here’s a necessary personal disclosure: I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. Like, I’m on the record swearing about it.
But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed. The harms Meta passively and actively fueled destroyed or ended hundreds of thousands of lives that might have been yours or mine, but for accidents of birth. I say “hundreds of thousands” because “millions” sounds unbelievable, but by the end of my research I came to believe that the actual number is very, very large.
To make sense of it, I had to try to go back, reset my assumptions, and try build up a detailed, factual understanding of what happened in this one tiny slice of the world’s experience with Meta. The risks and harms in Myanmar—and their connection to Meta’s platform—are meticulously documented. And if you’re willing to spend time in the documents, it’s not that hard to piece together what happened.
I started down this path—in this series, on this site, over this whole year—because I want to help make better technologies and systems in service of a better world. And I think the only way to make better things is to thoroughly understand what’s happened so far. Put another way, I want to base decisions on transparently sourced facts and cautiously reasoned analysis, not on assumptions or vibes—mine or anyone else’s.
What I want to promise you, my imaginary reader, is that I’ve approached this with as much care and precision as I can. I cite a lot of documentation from humanitarian organizations and many well-sourced media reports, and also a bunch of internal Meta documentation. What I’m after is maybe something like a cultural-technical incident report. I hope it helps.
This is the first of four posts in the series. Thank you for reading.
I’ve put notes about terms (Meta vs. Facebook, Myanmar vs. Burma, etc.) and sources and warnings in a separate meta-post. If you’re someone who likes to know about that kind of thing, you might want to pop that post open in a tab. If you spot typos or inaccuracies, I’m reachable at erin at incisive.nu and appreciate all bug reports.
Content warning: I’m marking some sections and some cited sources with individual warnings, but this is a story with a genocide at its heart, so be aware of that going in. I’ve also included a small selection of hateful messages in this post and throughout the series so that it’s clear what we’re talking about when we talk about “hate speech.” Some contain words that, used in specific contexts, constitute slurs. I put some notes about all of that in the meta post as well.
This is a story about tech
Even if you never read any further, know this: Facebook played what the lead investigator on the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (hereafter just “the UN Mission”) called a “determining role” in the bloody emergence of what would become the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.2
From far away, I think Meta’s role in the Rohingya crisis can feel blurry and debatable—it was content moderation fuckups, right? In a country they weren’t paying much attention to? Unethical and probably negligent, but come on, what tech company isn’t, at some point?
Plus, Meta has popped up in the press and before Congress to admit that they fucked up and have concrete plans to do better. They lost sleep over it, said Adam Mosseri, the person in charge of Facebook’s News Feed, back in March of 2018.
By that point in 2018, Myanmar’s military had murdered thousands of Rohingya people, including babies and children, and beaten, raped, tortured, starved, and imprisoned thousands more. About three-quarters of a million Rohingya had fled Myanmar to live in huge, disease-infested refugee camps in Bangladesh.
And Meta?
By that point, Meta had been receiving detailed and increasingly desperate warnings about Facebook’s role as an accelerant of genocidal propaganda in Myanmar for six years.
My big hope for the internet is that we handle the shit we need to handle to make sturdier, less poisoned/poisonous ways to connect and collaborate in the gnarly-looking decades ahead. I think that’s not just possible, but that it’s our responsibility to work toward it. Also, I’m pretty sure that despite the best intentions and the most transparent processes, we risk doing enormous harm if we don’t learn from the past. (Maybe even if we do.)
This series is for anyone who, like me—and despite everything not good about the tech world—has found themselves periodically heartened and sustained by open technology projects, online communities, and ways of being together even when we’re far apart.
And the thing I want you, and all of us, to remember about the sudden flowering of the internet in Myanmar in the 2010s is that in the beginning, it was incredibly welcome and so filled with hope.
Welcome to the internet
After decades of crushing state repression, a more democratic regime came into power in Myanmar in 2011 and gradually relaxed restrictions on the internet, and on speech more generally. Journalist and tech researcher Faine Greenwood (they/them) is working in Southeast Asia at the time, and gets caught up in the spirit of the moment, despite their skepticism about the benefits of the internet:
I’d connected with a Myanmar NGO dedicated to digital inclusion, and through them, I got a chance to meet and interview a number of brilliant and extremely online Burmese people, all of them brimming with long-suppressed, almost giddy, optimism about their country’s technological future.
It was hard for me not to share their enthusiasm, their massive relief at finally getting out from under the jackboot of a military regime that had tried to lock them away from the rest of their world for as long as they could remember. I came away from speaking with them with a warm, happy feeling about how online communication maybe, just maybe, really did have the power to unfuck the world.3
And online communication was coming in fast, as the price of SIM cards, which had been controlled by the ruling junta, dropped from the equivalent of $2,000 USD in 2009, to $250 in 2012, to $1.50 in 2014.4
Mobile adoption explodes, from less than one quarter of a percent of the population in 2011 to more than 90% in 2017.5 And smartphone use and internet uptake spikes with the mobile revolution instead of dragging along behind—a 2017 Bloomberg article does some flavor reporting to contextualize those numbers:
Thiri Thant Mon, owner of a small investment bank in the city, says she still remembers how magazines from the outside world used to arrive weeks late because censors needed time to comb through them.
“Suddenly because we’re on internet,” she said, “people realize what the rest of the world looks like. Now it’s like everybody on the street is talking about Trump. A few years ago, nobody knew what was happening in the next town.”6
In 2015, writer and photographer Craig Mod is working with a team doing internet ethnography in rural Myanmar on behalf of an organization that designs and builds hardware—including modern farming implements—to improve the lives of farmers, who make up the majority of Myanmar’s populace. (Disclosure: Craig and I have halfass-known each other for going on a couple of decades, and I’m a longtime fan of his work.)
Mod’s essay about his work is clearly the product of a sensitive eye and a nerd’s delight in the way new technology twines up with the unevenly distributed realities of daily life:
The village still lacks electricity although they’ve pooled funds and a dozen newly planted metal-power poles dot the fields, waiting to be wired up. Through our interpreter I ask, Where do you charge? Farmer Number Ten points to a car battery hanging in the corner onto which familiar USB wires are spliced.
The tech is all over the place, “cheap but capable,” and Craig wonders if the one-smartphone-per-human result would make Nicholas Negroponte happy. There are no iPhones, no credit cards, no data plans: “Everyone buys top-up from top-up shops, scratches off complex serial numbers printed in a small font, types them with special network codes into their phone dialers in a way that feels steampunkish, like they’re divining data. They feel each megabyte.”7
This is the point in the conversation when it becomes impossible not to talk about Facebook. Because in Myanmar, even back in 2012 and 2013, being online meant being on Facebook.
I’d read about Facebook’s superdominance in Amnesty International’s reporting, in long stories from Reuters and Wired and the NYT and the Guardian, in books, even in UN reports. But Mod’s notes bring to life both Facebook’s pervasiveness and the way Burmese people actually used it:
We ask about apps. The farmer uses [chat app] Viber and Facebook. He says he chats with a few friends on Facebook but mainly people he doesn’t know. Most of his Facebook friends are strangers. He tells us his brother installed the app for him, and set up his account. He doesn’t know the email address that was used. He gets most of his news from Facebook. The election looms and he loves the political updates.
Farmer Number Ten tells us he used to use radio for news but no more. He says he hasn’t turned the radio on in years. Other news apps—like one called TZ—use too much data. He’s data conscious. He uses Facebook mostly at night when the internet is fastest, and cheapest.
And speaking with the proprietor of a cellphone shop:
Facebook is the most popular app, he says. Nine out of ten people who come into the shop want Facebook. Ten months ago SIM prices dropped, data prices dropped, interest in Facebook jumped. I take note. Only half the people who come into the shop already have a Facebook account. The other half don’t know how to make one. I do that for them, he says. I am the account maker.
And what about other apps? He mentions a news app called TZ. Once popular, now less so. He brushes his hand aside and says it’s too data hungry. Everyone is data sensitive he says and reiterates: Facebook. Nobody needs a special app for their interests. Just search for your interest on Facebook. Facebook is the Internet.8
But how did Facebook get to be the internet?
In the early years, there’s a stripped-down version of the app kicking around that used less data than competitors’. But also, when Myanmar’s government opens up to two foreign telecom services, the stronger of the two, Norway’s Telenor, “zero-rates” Facebook.9 Essentially, zero-rating is a selective subsidy; it means that customers won’t be charged for the data they use for some parts of the internet, but not others. For all of Telenor’s customers, using Facebook is free.
I want to briefly flip ahead to something Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen says in a 2021 interview:
Facebook bought the privilege of being the internet for the majority of languages in the world. It subsidized people’s use of its own platform, and said “Hey, you can use anything you want, but you’ll have to pay for that—or you can use our platform for free.” As a result, for the majority of languages in the world, 80 or 90% of all the content in that exists in those languages is on Facebook.10
That this explosion of connectivity presented dangers as well as freedoms is immediately clear to civil society orgs in Myanmar, for two main reasons: The first is the state of comparative innocence with which the vast majority of Burmese people approach the internet. The second is that the political situation in Myanmar is a powderkeg at best.
There’s a third thing, though most people don’t know it yet, which is that Meta’s decision-making about Myanmar reflects no willingness to adjust for the first two. To get to that, we need to start at the beginning.
The blogger and the monk
A tiny canned history of modern Myanmar might go like this: In a series of East-India-Company–entangled conflicts, the British Empire took control of Myanmar, then called Burma. From the beginning of the wars in 1824 to 1948, Britain ruled Burma, with a big rupture during WWII when Japan invaded Burma.
After the war, the Burmese government the British left behind was too weak to withstand the combination of vigorous civil conflict with ethnic minorities on the frontiers and a 1962 coup by military leaders.
Beginning in 1962, Burma—renamed Myanmar in English by the ruling junta, but the two names come from the same root—is under incredibly tight military rule. Beginning in 2011, the junta relaxes their grip, and Myanmar begins a precarious transition to a more democratic form of government. Note: All through this entire period, Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, is also waging a 70-year civil war with armed insurgencies associated with several different ethnic minorities.
Starting the year after Myanmar’s first quasi-democratic general election in 2010, the Burmese government begins granting mass amnesties to the country’s many political prisoners. Hundreds of people—journalists, activists, artists, religious leaders, and many more—are released over the next few years.
In the mass amnesty granted in January of 2012, two of the many prisoners released will go on to found organizations that play major and opposing roles in escalating crises of communal and military violence that Myanmar’s entry to the internet will fuel.
One is Nay Phone Latt, an early blogger and digital rights activist, who was jailed in 2008, basically for blogging about the 2007 Saffron Revolution demonstrations. Nay Phone Latt will go on to co-found MIDO, an organization dedicated to helping Myanmar’s ordinary citizens reap the benefits of the newly available internet. Over the next several years, MIDO will come up repeatedly in the intense struggle against online hate campaigns, especially on Facebook.11
The second is Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk jailed in 2003 for sermons inciting violence against Myanmar’s Muslim communities.12 Wirathu will go on to digitize Myanmar’s hardline extremist Buddhist movement, which will play a major role in the coming waves of anti-Muslim violence—also especially on Facebook.
In
