YANGON, Myanmar — The internet brought Donald Trump to Myanmar. Or, at least that’s how Shar Ya Wai first remembers hearing about the Republican president-elect.
“One day, nobody knew him. Then, everyone did. That’s what the internet is. It takes people who say crazy things and makes them famous,” the 19-year-old student said.
Like most people in this country of 50 million, which only recently opened up to the outside world, Shar Ya Wai is new to the internet. And on this day, she had walked purposefully into a phone shop in central Yangon to buy her first smartphone, a simple model by China’s Huawei that is popular among her friends. “Today I’ll buy this phone,” she said. “I guess I’ll find out how crazy [the internet] really is.”
It’s not that she’d never seen the internet before. She’d tried to stalk ex-boyfriends through a friend’s Facebook page and caught glimpses of the latest Thai pop bands on her uncle’s old tablet, which he bought secondhand a year ago. But her forays into the internet have been brief and largely left her perplexed. Here was a public space where everyone seemed to have so much to say, but it was disorganized, bombastic, overwhelming. It felt like the polar opposite of the quiet, sheltered life she’d lived until recently.
“My father is a measured person. He speaks carefully and always wanted us to speak carefully too,” she said, smoothing down her waist-length black hair, betraying her nerves. “I’m more energetic, like my mom. We speak a lot more, but it is nothing like what I see on the internet.”
It was her father who wanted her to put off buying a phone until she was old enough to “use it safely,” though she wasn’t really sure what that meant. She thought he might be referring to the men who post crass and vulgar photos online. Or he might be worried about the various scammers who are increasingly targeting the nascent internet in Myanmar. She wasn't sure because no one had ever told her how to stay safe online — what to do, or say, or write.
Still, on this day in mid-July, Shar Ya Wai pushed herself out of a crowded store in central Yangon, holding the cellophane-wrapped cell phone as though it were an injured bird. Her fingers cradled the top and felt for the button that would turn it on, but then hesitated.
“Maybe I should wait until later. I should wait until I’m with my family,” she said, and then admitted, “I’m scared.”
She has reason to be afraid. For nearly five decades, Myanmar lived under military dictatorships that suppressed all forms of dissent and limited free speech, leading to US and European sanctions that largely cut off the country from the rest of the world. That changed in 2011, when the military junta was officially dissolved and a nominally civilian government was established. In 2015, in the first national election since the military eased its hold, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party was voted into power. Of the changes to hit the largely Buddhist country since then, few have been as drastic — and as rapid — as the sudden arrival of the internet to the general public. It revolutionized everything, from how people interact with one another to how they get their news, once the exclusive purview of hyper-regulated state-sanctioned media.
“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff. I never knew about Trump and then everyone was talking about him.”
Today, news sites have become so popular that print magazines called Facebook and The Internet regurgitate stories spotted online for stragglers who have not yet joined the internet revolution. Many of them feature sensational and salacious tales, cribbed from Facebook pages with a very loose definition of facts. Drinking ice-cold water while eating hot food will give you a stomach ache! Angelina Jolie has secretly adopted a Burmese baby but is keeping it locked away due to a deformity! A Thai cabinet minister is secretly dating an Olympic gymnast!
These stories, at least, do little harm. But there has also been an increase in articles that demonize the country’s minority Muslim community, with fake news claiming that vast hordes of Muslim worshippers are attacking Buddhist sites. These articles, quickly shared and amplified on social media, have correlated with a surge in anti-Muslim protests and attacks on local Muslim groups.
Violence against Myanmar’s minority Muslim community has plagued the country for decades; in the last month, 70 Rohingya Muslims were killed in a wave of violence so intense that Human Rights Watch says the burned-down villages can be viewed from satellites in space. Mobilized by the sudden freedom of online platforms like Facebook, groups that once lived on the fringes of the political landscape, such as radical Buddhist anti-Muslim groups, have suddenly found supporters across the country. And, what’s more, those supporters have found solidarity in extreme movements around the world, including the more radical, nationalist American groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, that have supported Trump.
If fake news had the power to influence people’s minds during the US elections, in a country with a well-established mainstream media landscape, what could it do in Myanmar, with a nascent news media, only recently freed from the military’s stranglehold?
“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff. I never knew about Trump and then everyone was talking about him,” Shar Ya Wai said. She remembered getting into a fight with one friend who suggested that a Muslim family living in his middle-class suburb should be evicted, because Trump was going to ban Muslims and that it seemed like a good idea. “My friend was saying, ‘That is a good idea. We should do like America and do it here too. No more Muslims!’”
Her friend, like many in Myanmar, had gone online, discovered an extreme point of view, and then used it to reaffirm his own ideology within his country’s political ecosystem. Today’s internet was built for that sort of sharing. It is often the voices that shout the loudest, and tell the most outlandish stories, that are most likely to make it to the top of the News Feed — whether the news itself is real or fake. Despite debate in the US over the role that fake news played in the recent presidential elections, Facebook has maintained that it did not play a large role. Mark Zuckerberg initially argued that it was “extremely unlikely” that fake news affected the vote, although he later said he did take the issue seriously. Facebook employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News have suggested that content should be marked as verified, if it comes from trusted news sources.
Facebook’s influence in Myanmar is hard to quantify, but its domination is so complete that people in Myanmar use “internet” and “Facebook” interchangeably. According to Amara Digital, a Yangon-based marketing agency, Facebook has doubled its local base in the last year to 9.7 million monthly users. That number is likely to spike again, after Facebook launched its Free Basics program, a free, streamlined version of Facebook and a handful of other sites.
There was this idea, Shar Ya Wai said, that Facebook was for saying anything you wanted.
And that’s what’s been happening — from extremist monks to political cartoonists. Dozens of people have been jailed for what they’ve written on Facebook, though human rights groups say the exact number is unknown as many arrests go unreported, especially outside the city centers, where the legal system is not as closely monitored.
For many in Myanmar, the internet and Facebook brought with it the banner of free speech and American values — but no one had told them what would happen if they tested the values of free speech under a government still feeling its way out of military control. Was it the responsibility of Facebook, or their own government, to teach them how to safely use the internet? Would Facebook protect them for what they wrote online? How do you give people the internet they crave while keeping them safe? And given how many Americans, including Trump, fell for fake news during the elections, how were people in Myanmar expected to judge what was real and what was fake?
Shar Ya Wai did, eventually, turn the phone on, after a stall next to the mobile store told her they couldn’t activate the SIM card and data plan without activating the phone and dialing in to one of Myanmar’s local carriers, MTN. As she left the store, her phone was on, though Facebook and other apps remained closed. “I will use Facebook. I have to … that is the world.”
She agreed to keep in touch over the next few weeks as she got used to life with the internet in her pocket.
Customers inside a mobile phone shop in Yangon.
Minzayar Oo / BuzzFeed News
Back in 2011, a SIM card for a mobile phone could cost upwards of $3,000, and was available only to those with high-level government connections. A handful of internet cafés existed, most of them in the capital, but were far too expensive for the average person. Less than 0.2% of the country was online, according to the International Monetary Fund.
In the years immediately following the easing of military's rule, internet use climbed slowly. Laptops were rare and desktops rarer still. It wasn’t until 2014, when the country opened its doors to international telecom companies, that the floodgates really opened. Suddenly, mobile towers were everywhere.
“In 2011, our subscribers were in the thousands. Now, we are at 35 million in a country of 50 million,” said Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, vice president of sustainability and corporate responsibility at telecoms giant Ericsson. She visited the country earlier this year to check in with a program Ericsson is running to provide internet access and tablets to 31 schools in rural Myanmar, reaching roughly 22,000 students. In many cases, the tablets were the student’s first, and only, access to the internet. “The rate of mobile use in Myanmar is unbelievable. The first six months of this year, Myanmar was in the top three countries globally with new mobile subscriptions.”
The World Bank estimates that roughly 20% of Myanmar is now online, most of that in just the last two years. In comparison, internet use in the United States, where commercial providers began to offer the internet access in late 1989, took seven years to reach a point where 20% of the US was online. In India, which is one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world, internet use took off in 2000, but didn’t reach 20% of the population until mid-2015.
Myanmar, said Weidman-Grunewald, was unique in that its isolation from the internet was so complete for so long, and then, just as quickly, it opened up its whole country to the whole, unfiltered internet.
Nowhere is the sudden growth as evident as in the shops underneath the golden peaks of the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Sheltered beneath the awning of the pagoda, shops that once sold stamps and watches have disappeared, replaced by storefronts crammed with mobile phones and accessories.
“This is all anybody buys,” said Mai Thu Sien, a 19-year-old salesman. He didn’t seem bothered to be squeezed onto a street bustling with other shops selling exactly the same thing. “There are many customers for phones. People buy and buy.”
For the equivalent of $3, Mai Thu Sien sets up an email address, opens up a Facebook account in any name the customer wants, and sends them on their way. When asked whether customers choose their own email address, Mai Thu Sien looked confused. “Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
If they forget their login information, or get signed out, they simply come in for a new Facebook account. Of the dozens of people interviewed by BuzzFeed News in Myanmar, all said they had more than one Facebook account. None knew about Facebook’s policy that users must use their real names.
Two days after she bought her phone, Shar Ya Wai sent a text message saying that she’d opened up an account and was adding friends.
“I only have 12 right now,” she said, adding that a friend of her brother’s had set up the account and that she too had no idea it was linked to email address. “Everyone is really nice. My friend put up photos of a trip together to Mandalay.”
“It’s not as bad as I thought,” she said.
A street vendor selling mobile phone accessories in Yangon on July 17.
Minzayar Oo / BuzzFeed News
The taxi raced down a slip road to the airport and then juddered to a halt in front of a small shack with chickens pecking outside. Ashin Wirathu, a monk whose hardline anti-Muslim positions have earned him the nickname “the Burmese Bin Laden,” smiled as he rolled down his window to chat with a journalist he recognized. Wirathu — who has been imprisoned for sermons calling for the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority — was heading off to the airport for a vacation, but couldn’t resist one more chance to get his name in the news.
Wirathu rose to prominence as part of a group of extremist monks once known as the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, and then the “969” movement. Today, they are called Ma Ba Tha, after their Burmese acronym. Since the end of military rule, monks have assumed an increasingly public role in the largely Buddhist country. Wirathu, and the Ma Ba Tha movement, have denied any role in the Buddhist lynch mobs, which, in recent years, have killed more than 200, and displaced more than 150,000 of the country’s Muslims, who make up roughly 4% of the total population. Civil society groups allege that the state's security forces have fomented recent outbreaks of violence against the Rohingya. But there is no denying that Ma Ba Tha's bashing of Muslims as “cruel and savage” is often repeated by those who want to see all Muslims expelled from Myanmar — and they admit that their anti-Muslim stance has gained its largest following through Facebook.
The controversial Buddhist monk Wirathu.
Thierry Falise / Getty Images
This week, following news that Trump’s administration was being staffed with hardliners, Wirathu released a statement hailing Trump’s White House as a victory in the fight against “Islamic terrorism.”
“May US citizens be free from jihad. May the world be free of bloodshed,” Wirathu wrote in a public statement. It was one of many Trump received from figures across the world who appeared to feel emboldened by his win.
It was not the first time Wirathu had taken to Facebook to bolster his position globally. Following his release from jail in January 2012, where he had served a seven-year prison sentence for inciting anti-Muslim pogroms in 2003, Wirathu immediately took to the platform.
“If the internet had not come to [Myanmar], not many people would know my opinion and messages like now,” Wirathu told BuzzFeed News, adding that he had always written books and delivered sermons but that the “internet is a faster way to spread the messages.”
His first account was small, he said, and almost immediately deleted by Facebook moderators who wrote that it violated their community standards. The second had 5,000 friends and grew so quickly he could no longer accept new requests. So he started a new page and hired two full-time employees who now update the site hourly.
“I have a Facebook account with 190,000 followers and a news Facebook page. The internet and Facebook are very useful and important to spread my messages,” he said.
On the dozens of Facebook pages he runs out of a dedicated office, Wirathu has called for the boycott of Muslim businesses, and for Muslims to be expelled from Myanmar. He said he has a hard time keeping the pages open, since Facebook keeps shutting them down. He manages, nonetheless, to maintain an ever-growing online following.
“I’m glad blocking exists.”
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