In Myanmar, Facebook struggles with a deluge of disinformation

MG MG KYAW can still remember the day he got his first mobile phone. It was 2012, and Myanmar was emerging from decades under the heel of a military junta. In a country where GDP per person was $1,000, SIM cards, which sold for as much as $2,000, were like gold dust. Only North Korea had fewer mobile phones per person.

When a civilian government took power a decade ago, it ended pre-publication censorship and liberalised telecommunications. Mr Mg Mg Kyaw applied to the government to purchase a SIM card, then in limited supply. He won the “lucky draw”, as he puts it, and shelled out 500,000 kyat ($387) for the chip. When he took his new phone to the university where he was a student, he was thronged by curious friends. “I felt like a star,” he says.

Facebook was already installed on Mr Mg Mg Kyaw’s phone when he bought it. As the price of a SIM card plunged, to as low as $1.50 by 2014, and the number of cards relative to the population skyrocketed, from 2% in 2011 to 126% in 2020, Facebook stepped up its effort to get onto Burmese smartphones. In 2016 it rolled out its “Free Basics” program, which gives users who sign up for a Facebook account free access to a limited number of pre-selected websites. With Free Basics, Facebook hoped to conquer much of the developing world. In Myanmar, the tactic worked.

The...

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