< 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 smartph
