By Daisye Rainer
This day and age, social media rules most of the things we do. It’s often how we keep in touch with friends, how we find strangers, how we spread messages, and how we get information from anywhere in the world. We often think of social media as a tool that makes the world a little smaller and one that connects us to people and helps us form communities. Put simply, social media is powerful. Because at its foundation, social media is easily accessible. However, sometimes this accessibility can be manipulated. Anything, no matter its verifiability, can be amplified.
The most poignant example of this is that of Facebook in Myanmar. Facebook is widely used in Myanmar, with almost 18 million users. According to the New York Times, it is “so broadly used that many…confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the Internet” (Mozur). Needless to say, Facebook is a major source of information for many people in Myanmar. But when social media becomes the Internet, any message or post is a little bit more credible or believable.
Therefore, when military officials in Myanmar began to use Facebook to spread messages of hate, hostility, and lies about the Rohingya people in August of 2018, much of the public continued to read into and spread the messages. In short, the anti-Rohingya propaganda proliferated across Facebook and played a large role in encouraging hostility and violence towards the Muslim minority.
This manipulation of the media was only a part of a much larger tension between the Buddhist majority in Myanmar and the Rohingya minority, which led to the exodus and displacement of over 700,000 people last August (McKirdy). Discrimination of the Rohingya people has existed for years, ranging from policies that deprive Muslim people of complete citizenship to arbitrary arrests, killings, rapes, and abuses of Muslim people.
But Facebook gave that discrimination and hate a voice. It manifested itself in a more dangerous way because many were taking these false posts as plausible— as news. Facebook, then, was a tool that aided a genocide, as the UN describes it, and violence against the Rohingya people. A platform this broadly accessible obviously has serious implications on the messages we are receiving and the information that governs our decision making.
The way that social media gives a voice to anyone demonstrates how it can be manipulated for political gain, personal agendas, or in this case, “ethnic cleansing” (Mozur). Myanmar is an extreme example of the manipulation of social media, but it illustrates social media’s innate power over users and the public at large. In truth, it appears that the media has a much tighter grasp on the workings of politics, culture, and society than we’d like to admit.
