Washington Post: Facebook blocks accounts of Myanmar’s top general, other military leaders

Facebook blocks accounts of Myanmar’s top general, other military leaders

SINGAPORE – When Facebook officials heard that a damning U.N. report would again make a link between hate speech on the social media site and atrocities in Myanmar, they knew they had to act, a person familiar with their thinking said.

Without consulting the Myanmar government, Facebook on Monday removed Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s page from its platform, along with those of other top military brass, and preemptively banned others. The U.N. report “put a deadline on what they were planning on doing anyway,” the person, who was not authorized to talk to the media, added.

In all, Facebook said in a post that it banned 18 accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages. Almost 12 million people followed the accounts.

The decision was made to “prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions,” Facebook said. The company said it was preserving data from the deleted accounts and pages.

Facebook also said Monday that it discovered and removed 46 pages and 12 accounts engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

“During a recent investigation, we discovered that they used seemingly independent news and opinion Pages to covertly push the messages of the Myanmar military,” the company said.

A spokeswoman for the company declined to provide further details on those pages and accounts, citing ongoing work to identify any other related activity. Naming the pages, she said, could hamper these efforts.

Naing Swe Oo, director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, a military-backed think tank whose Facebook page remained active Monday evening, condemned Facebook’s actions.

“Taking down the Facebook pages of Tatmadaw leaders and others [the same day as the U.N. report] is unfair, one-side and coordinated,” he said, using Myanmar’s name for its military.

This turn of event is significant, as Facebook is synonymous to Internet for most of the Myanmar people, as they mostly did not experience the gradual introduction of internet via computers. (Most people think Facebook IS the internet).

This block and removal of the Tatmadaw from Facebook is as good as removing them from the internet altogether in Myanmar. This will have serious repercussions to the Tatmadaw’s propaganda and information warfare efforts.

Myanmar’s commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, attends an event marking Martyrs’ Day in Yangon, Myanmar, on July 19. (ANN WANG/Reuters)