< http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/13/burma-gives-a-big-thumbs-up-to-facebook/ >
Burma Gives a Big Thumbs-Up to Facebook
Four years ago Facebook didn't exist in Burma. Now it's the country's
most important source of information.
* By Christian Caryl -- Christian Caryl is the author of
Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. A
former reporter at Newsweek, he is a senior fellow at the Legatum
Institute (which co-publishes Democracy Lab with Foreign Policy)
and is a contributing editor at the National Interest. He is also a
senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a regular contributor to
the New York Review of Books.
* November 13, 2015 - 5:11 pm
* christian.caryl
* @ccaryl
Burma Gives a Big Thumbs-Up to Facebook
As the vote count draws to a close, it's clear that Burma's
long-suffering opposition has scored a landslide victory in
Sunday's historic national election. And the leader of that opposition
knows whom to thank. As she was explaining the reasons for her party's
remarkable triumph in an interview with the BBC this week, Nobel
Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi said this: "And then of course there's
the communications revolution. This has made a huge difference.
Everybody gets onto the net and informs everybody else of what is
happening. And so it's much more difficult for those who wish to commit
irregularities to get away with it."
She could have been a little more specific, though. When people here in
Burma refer to the "Internet," what they often have in mind is Facebook
-- the social media network that dominates all online activity in this
country to a degree unimaginable anywhere else. When President Thein
Sein decided to issue a statement conceding victory to Suu Kyi's
triumphant League for National Democracy (NLD), he used the Facebook
page of the presidential spokesman to do it. The army published a
similar concession statement on its own Facebook page. And when Suu Kyi
held a press conference a few days before the election, millions of
people tuned in via Facebook (since state-run media did not deign to
show it).
Both Suu Kyi and her opponents were just following the eyeballs. Though
the company declines to provide statistics on its Burma operations,
experts put the number of registered Facebook users (in this country of
50 million) at 6.4 million. That's up from more or less zero until the
fall of 2011 -- since Facebook didn't even officially exist in the
country until then. Facebook's Messenger app also enjoys huge
popularity thanks to its reputation for good security -- an important
selling point in a country with a long history of aggressive government
surveillance. (In Burma, at least, you can use Messenger without
actually having an account, and many Burmese seem to be doing just
that.) "Facebook has become an important and growing part of people's
lives in Myanmar," says Facebook representative Clare Wareing, using
the official name for Burma, "and we are humbled by the ways we see
people in Myanmar connect in big and small ways." (Wareing works for
the Australian branch of the company, which is responsible for
operations in Burma.)
Yet even if the powers-that-be have tried to harness it to their own
ends, it's indisputably Aung San Suu Kyi and her party that have been
the biggest beneficiaries of Facebook's startling rise. That's because
television and radio -- the means by which most Burmese get their
information -- remain firmly under state control, as do large swathes
of the print media. Facebook, which arrived in Burma about the time
that the government set about dismantling its long-standing system of
censorship, has given the opposition a crucial way of closing the gap.
Than Htut Aung, Chairman and CEO of Eleven Media Group, says that his
company -- one of the country's biggest private media conglomerates --
has distinguished itself from its state-run rivals by its generous
coverage of the NLD, which is why its Facebook page now boasts 4.5
million followers. (Eleven Media's website, by contrast, has a
negligible audience.) When a member of the ruling party insulted Suu
Kyi in a Facebook post a few months ago, the corresponding report on
Eleven Media's Facebook page received a mind-boggling 20,000
comments.
It's the pluralism of Facebook, says Aung, that has made it the
dominant source of information for young Burmese: "Six months ago, it
was people in their forties and fifties who were interested in
politics. Now it's the people in their twenties and thirties who are
interested in the election -- and that's due mainly to Facebook."
Yet it's not just the usual suspects who depend on the social media
network. The proliferation of smartphones extends far beyond the
educated elite (including, increasingly, people in the countryside, who
make up the majority of Burma's citizens). Htay Aung, 29, a fishmonger
who works at an open-air market in Rangoon's Insein district, accesses
Facebook through his Huawei smartphone. Asked whether he's ever used
Google, he shakes his head with a smile. "I use my phone to make calls
and to look at Facebook," he says. He follows posts from 30 or so of
his friends and a few online newspapers. He shares all of the news he
gets from Facebook with his wife, who also works in the market.
The sudden dominance of Facebook has much to do with the peculiarities
of development in a country that has gone through "twenty years of
digital development in two years," says Yan Naung Oak of
Phandeeyar, a non-profit group that tries to harness technology
for social causes. As recently as three years ago, he notes, Internet
access and mobile phones were virtually unknown in the country, which
has spent most of the past sixty years in a political and economic deep
freeze thanks to a tiny coterie of military leaders who kept it under
tight control -- until five years ago, when they started loosening the
reins.
Two years ago, the government issued the country's first mobile phone
licenses, and that, combined with an influx of cheap Chinese handsets,
enabled ordinary Burmese to leapfrog from a decrepit landline network
straight to 21st-century mobile Internet. Phandeeyar's David Madden
says that what makes Burma unique is that it's the "first country this
size to come online via smartphones."
In an environment consisting almost entirely of novice users,
Facebook's ease of use (and the ease with which pretty much anyone can
set up an account) has given it a huge advantage. (For a while, says
Yan Naung Oak, certain shops in Rangoon specialized in setting up
Facebook accounts for customers for a fee of 2,000 kyats, about $1.60
at current rates.) Yet its dominance also brings concerns. Some experts
worry that its effective monopoly will weigh on media diversity
and quash urgently needed innovation.
And then there's the problem of incendiary rhetoric. It's an issue
familiar to online communities everywhere, but it's a particularly
urgent one in Burma, where sixty years of dictatorship have stored up a
toxic brew of sectarian tensions and long-festering grievances that
have only just begun to emerge into the open. The movement of
ultranationalist Buddhist monks known as Ma Ba Tha has used
Facebook as an instrument for the spread of its rants against the
Muslim minority, which it views as a threat to the dominant Buddhist
culture.
When a leading Ma Ba Tha activist published an anti-Muslim smear on his
Facebook page recently, Yan Naing, a Muslim lawyer in Rangoon, reported
the post to the police, citing a law against online hate speech.
"Facebook is a big platform," he says. "In our country most young
people are using Facebook, so a lot of them have seen the post. It has
a lot of impact -- and a lot of Muslim people are very upset." (He
hastens to add that "real Buddhists," whom he describes as "very good
and kind," would never lower themselves to insult another religion like
this.) Phandeeyar, the civic tech organization, has launched an online
campaign that features a traditional Burmese folk character as a mascot
to promote the message "think before you post."
It remains to be seen whether Burma can find ways of coping with issues
-- like how to safeguard free speech from the extremist ranters who
exploit it -- that bedevil even mature democracies. A more diverse
online ecosystem might not be a bad idea, either. For the moment,
though, Burma's love affair with Facebook shows no signs of cooling
off.
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