An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

By March 2013, Matt Schissler had grown increasingly worried about the rumors circulating in Yangon. Friends who were Buddhist, the majority population of Myanmar, showed the American aid worker grainy cell phone photos of bodies they said were of Buddhist monks killed by Muslims. Others shared conspiracy theories about plots by the Rohingya, a long-resented Muslim minority.

“People wanted to tell me about all the ways in which Muslims were bad. Islamophobic stuff was suddenly coming up all the time, in every conversation,” Schissler recalled. At six two, with close-cropped brown hair and blue eyes, he stood out as obviously American. “People had this idea that because of 9/11, I, as an American, would hate Muslims. They thought I would sympathize with them hating Muslims.”

The neighbors Schissler had been getting to know around his urban neighborhood of Yangon were suddenly brandishing their cell phones to show him articles—some from reputable outlets like the BBC, others based on unnamed sources and dubious evidence—that claimed that Islamic State jihadists were en route to Myanmar. A journalist friend called to warn Schissler of a vague plot by Muslims to attack the country; he said he had seen a video showing the Muslims plotting to attack. Schissler could tell that the video was obviously edited, dubbed over in Burmese with threatening language. “He was a person who should have known better, and he was just falling for, believing, all this stuff,” Schissler observed.

The spread of the doctored photos and videos coincided with Myanmar’s introduction to cell phones. While the rest of the world went online and embraced mobile technology, Myanmar’s military dictatorship had made it impossible for the average person to do either. But by the start of 2013, as military rule began to ease and as the government allowed foreign telecommunications operators into the nation, cell phone costs plummeted, and cheap used smartphones flooded the market.3 They came loaded with the internet and Facebook.

“Blue,” the name used within the company for its flagship app, was their gateway online—the first, and often the only, app people in Myanmar used. The company’s app was so popular that people there used the words Facebook and internet interchangeably. In the largest cities, where shops hawking mobile phones lined block after block of crowded streets, vendors helped users create Facebook accounts.

In a country where military rulers controlled newspapers and radio, Facebook felt like a bastion for individual expression. The Burmese were quick adopters of the technology. They shared family photos, egg curry recipes, opinions, memes, and folk stories. For those not yet online, a monthly magazine called Facebook was published that aggregated postings found on the social network.

The app was also a favorite of military figures and religious propagandists. Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk whose anti-Muslim positions earned him the nickname “the Buddhist bin Laden,” was quick to discover the platform’s power.4 In the early 2000s, he had been arrested for helping incite an anti-Muslim riot. But with Facebook, his operation and ideas became professionalized. Wirathu had an office in Mandalay Bay, where his students ran several Facebook pages under his name that advocated for violence against the Rohingya. They posted altered videos and photographs of corpses they claimed were of Burmese Buddhists who had been killed by Rohingya militants. They also stoked fears with rumors that the Rohingya were planning to attack civilian Buddhist populations in Mandalay and Yangon. None of the attacks materialized, but the rumors spread widely and contributed to panic and anger among the general population. Other monks and military generals were sharing similar posts that were then widely distributed by Burmese nationals. Dehumanizing photos and videos compared the Rohingya to vermin, insects, and rodents. People also posted videos meant to look science-based that asserted that Rohingya DNA was different from that of other people.

The ideas were not new. For years, state-sponsored radio and newsletters had made similar vitriolic claims against the Muslim minority. But Facebook enabled civilians to become the new bullhorns of hate. Individuals were passing along dangerous rhetoric they claimed had come from friends and family. Divorced from state media, which everyone knew were arms of propaganda for the government, the hate speech was more widely accepted and endorsed.