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American  election  watching  in  Myanmar:  Considering  social  media  and  Buddhist-­‐Muslim  conflict  

Matt Schissler, in Nick Cheesman & Htoo Kyaw Win (ed.), Communal Violence in Myanmar, Myanmar Knowledge Society, Yangon, 2015 [In Burmese and English].1

FINAL pre-publication draft

As Myanmar continues to face violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities a number of voices, from within the country and from outside, have raised concerns about the influence of social media. After riots in Mandalay during July 2014, for example, international and local media and government sources identified rumours circulating on Facebook as the cause.2 President Thein Sein has also raised concerns about ‘hate speech’ and other instigating messages shared online and in her first report the new UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Myanmar, Ms Yanghee Lee, noted that such messages are fuelling and triggering violence.3 But less than 5% of the population in Myanmar is estimated to have access to the Internet.4 How can access to social media be contributing to Buddhist-Muslim conflicts?

To say that low Internet penetration rates proves the irrelevance of social media is too simple, however, especially because access to the Internet is expanding rapidly. As an empirical matter, it is likely too early to conclusively determine if and how social media access is influencing Buddhist-Muslim conflicts in Myanmar. But this does not mean the potential relationship is unworthy of consideration. Therefore, in order to generate insights that may be useful in both understanding the contemporary moment as well as anticipating the future, this chapter will draw from experiences with, and literature on, relationships between social media and political conflicts in another country context: the United States. 1 Portions of this article were circulated in the conference paper “Echo Chambers in Myanmar: Social Media and the Ideological Justifications for Mass Violence,” prepared for the Australian National University Department of Political & Social Change Research Colloquium, “Communal Conflict in Myanmar: Characteristics, Causes, Consequences,” 17-18 Mar 2014, Yangon, Myanmar. The author is thankful for feedback received. 2 See for example, Gianluca Mezzofiore, “Wirathu’s ‘Buddhist Woman Raped’ Facebook Post Stokes Anti-Muslim Violence in Mandalay,” International Business Times UK, 2 July 2014, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wirathus-buddhist-woman-raped-facebook-post-stokes-anti-muslim-violence-mandalay-1455069 (accessed 2 July 2014); Thomas Fuller and Wai Moe, “Buddhist-Muslim Mayhem Hits Myanmar’s No. 2 City,” The New York Times, July 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/world/asia/buddhist-muslim-mayhem-hits-myanmars-no-2-city.html (accessed 3 July 2014). 3 Yanghee Lee, Statement of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Yangon, Myanmar, July 26, 2014), http://www.mizzima.com/mizzima-news/myanmar/item/11906-un-special-rapporteur-s-statement/11906-un-special-rapporteur-s-statement (accessed 1 October 2014). 4 Estimates regarding Internet access vary. Regional marketing companies, for example, estimate that Internet connectivity is just 1%, but public references by private sector and government officials in Myanmar note 5%. But whatever the exact population with current access, it is clear that this percentage is a small one. See for example, We Are Social, 2014 Asia-Pacific Digital Overview: We Are Social’s Snapshot of Key Digital Data & Statistics (Singapore, January 16, 2014), http://www.slideshare.net/wearesocialsg/social-digital-mobile-in-apac (accessed 17 February 2014).

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It may seem strange to choose the US a comparator; it is, after all, an industrial democracy that is extremely different from Myanmar in terms of history, culture, political system and economic development. But this choice is deliberate, not least because it will help to complicate common assumptions about current conflicts in Myanmar as resulting from ignorance, poverty, age-old and primordial hatreds, or a state and society unable to manage new freedoms. The American political context, then, is an instructive comparison precisely because it is so different from Myanmar. In considering how the changing technological and media environment may contribute to conflict in Myanmar, the US may generate insights about potential dynamics that are both useful for identifying future research directions and for policy makers and civil society actors seeking to promote peace and social harmony. American election watching I first began thinking about technology and political conflict in Myanmar during November 2012. It was early morning in Yangon, where I sat with a group of other Americans to watch results as the polls closed across each time zone in the United States. Up at dawn, we had all pitched in to rent a cheap hotel room with satellite television, and we did our best to replicate the way we would watch an election back home: generic network coverage augmented by online news outlets, political blogs – and social media, where friends across the country were using Facebook and Twitter to do the same thing, posting updates, thoughts, and links.

In Myanmar, our Internet slowed to a crawl, as it often did at that time. We had one satellite news channel and the only Internet page that would load: Facebook. Part of the modern American election watching tradition culminates in television news channels announcing the results, and we sat and watched as Barack Obama was proclaimed the winner in successive states. On Facebook, my friends back home were increasingly celebratory. Of course they were; I am from the relatively liberal west coast, as are many of my friends, and nothing on my Facebook ‘newsfeed’ suggested that President Obama was anything but the superior choice. Seated next to me was a friend from conservative parts of Pennsylvania – his newsfeed was a mirror image of mine; that is, in complete reverse, heavily weighted towards the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Reading either of our separate newsfeeds provided a view into wildly divergent realities – the difference only becoming fully intelligible when we sat our laptops side by side and read them simultaneously. Our newsfeeds seemed to be completely sealed off from one another; discourse was not crossing over. Perhaps this effect was heightened by our vantage point. We were in Myanmar, after all. Facebook and satellite news were our only windows into America, and looking through them we saw two different campaigns, two different expected outcomes. Two different countries.

When we looked out over Yangon, we looked through windows in our communal hotel room. But more than glass mediated our view of the elections. The elections we saw were the ones described in the comments and articles linked to by our friends; we did not ‘see’ the election so much as read about it, via content carefully curated by other people with political viewpoints similar to our own. This is no surprise; Facebook users interact with and receive information from ‘friends,’ and these self-selected ‘friends’ are often highly similar to the user. Sociologists describe this as a tendency towards ‘homophily’ in social networks, which is

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another way to say ‘birds of a feather flock together.’5 As I watched the 2012 US presidential election, in other words, my window opened into a world populated mostly by people like me.

The level to which my election watching experience felt mediated was certainly heightened by our vantage point. We were Americans, in Myanmar and far from home; Facebook and satellite news were the only windows into our country. But many others have described similar experiences. Indeed, a recent book by Eli Pariser, who rose to prominence for online campaigns such as MoveOn.org, opens with a nearly identical anecdote.6 Pariser attributes this kind of experience to the ‘filter bubble,’ his term for the way that information accessed online is filtered by search engines and social media interfaces, which seek to predict what users are likely to find interesting, desirable – and credible. ‘Without sitting down next to a friend, it’s hard to tell how the version of Google or Yahoo News that you’re seeing differs from anyone else’s,’ says Pariser. ‘But because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important, true, and real, it’s critically important.’7

Cass Sunstein of Harvard University, meanwhile, has for over a decade been raising concerns about the negative impacts he believes new media are having on democracy, politics and society in America. In 2001, Sunstein published Republic.com, in which he used the concept of an ‘echo chamber’ to encapsulate the idea that people select information sources – and the friends from whom they get information – to fit their existing beliefs. Democrats, for example, are more likely to read news from liberal media outlets and Republics are more likely to access outlets that are conservative; and as a result, the news and information they access is not the same.8 For Sunstein, rather than enable a circulation of ideas that facilitates deliberation, this echo chamber means that the Internet and social media are likely to drive extremism: as individuals self-select information sources, their pre-existing beliefs and assumptions are reinforced, strengthened and made more extreme because they consistently hear information that aligns with – or does not contradict – these beliefs.9

At the time Republic.com was first being published, one of the most controversial presidential elections in recent US history was being decided. The 2000 Presidential election was too close to call; the views of how to proceed reflected the polarized views of the US two party system, with the outcome ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. In an essay on these events, Sunstein argued that the election controversy was not the result of simple partisanship, but instead the product of the same media environment described in Republic.com. ‘The phenomenon, sometimes called group polarization, involves the tendency of like-minded individuals engaged in discussion with one another to fortify their pre-existing views – and indeed to move toward more extreme points of view in the general direction in which they were already tending,’ he wrote. ‘If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are

5 Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001): 415–44. 6 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books/Penguin Press, 2012), 8. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 9 Cass R. Sunstein, “Neither Hayek nor Habermas,” Public Choice 134, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2008): 87–95.

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talking primarily with Democrats… there is a potential for the development of different forms of extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group.’10

Scholars from other fields have also raised concerns about the consequences when people access their information from a limited set of authorities. This is based upon a theory of the way that people determine what is ‘true’ in the world, not primarily from their own internal reasoning process but by relying on others. This is called ‘epistemic dependence,’ which refers to a kind of division of labour, the process by which a person, for example, accepts that smoking cigarettes causes cancer without grasping the full details of medical science. It is how societies function; not everyone has the opportunity or the time to train as a doctor. Instead, people learn to trust those who do.11

The idea that people are epistemologically dependent is not alarming when applied to medicine. But when people become exclusively reliant on one set of authorities, this can result in a situation that Michael Baurmann calls ‘epistemic seclusion.’ Baurmann argues that ‘epistemic seclusion’ explains why large groups of people sometimes adopt views that appear incredible to another audience; they adopt such views because the authorities they trust tell them they are so. While extreme, ‘irrational’ or fundamentalist viewpoints are often dismissed as the result of psychosis, primitive ignorance or susceptibility to brainwashing, Baurmann would say that such beliefs are a result that is not dissimilar from heeding a doctor’s warning.12

People in the United States get their information from a variety of sources of course, not just social media. It would thus not be accurate to say that all Americans are epistemically secluded. But Facebook and other social media have become dominant platforms, even more so than when Sunstein was originally writing, for accessing and sharing news and information. A survey released by the Pew Research centre in December 2013, for example, found that 73% of adults in the US were using some form of social media, with 63% of adults checking Facebook at least once a day.13 Facebook, meanwhile, is seeking to establish itself not just as a social network but, as founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in March 2013, ‘the best personalized newspaper in world.’14 Research released by Pew a few months later found that approximately half its users

10 Cass R. Sunstein, Echo Chambers: Bush V. Gore, Impeachment, and Beyond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 11 John Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence,” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–49. 12 See Michael. Baurmann, “Rational Fundamentalism? An Explanatory Model of Fundamentalist Beliefs,” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 150–66. See also Russell Hardin, “The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,” in Political Extremism and Rationality, ed. Albert Breton et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–22. 13 Aaron Smith and Maeve Duggan, “Social Media Update 2013,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, December 30, 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/ (17 February 2014). 14 Kevin Morris, “Facebook Is No Longer a Social Network,” The Daily Dot, March 7, 2013, http://www.dailydot.com/business/facebook-no-longer-social-network-news-feed/ (17 February 2014).

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get news from Facebook, a number that represents 30% of the US population.15 It is no wonder that Facebook was an important part of the way I experienced the 2012 election; it was likely similarly important for many others back home in America. Considering social media and Buddhist-Muslim violence My experience viewing the 2012 elections threw into stark relief the degree to which my understanding of American politics on that day was filtered by a lens of my Facebook friends’ own making. What are the implications for people in Myanmar if their understandings of important events, topics, and threats are similarly filtered? Sunstein and Pariser argue that the phenomena they have identified mean that social media is different from other media because they are filtered in ways that ensures content matches the user’s existing views and the views of their friends. The result is epistemic seclusion that can exacerbate conflicts and make divisions within societies more severe.

If Sunstein and Pariser’s arguments were layered directly onto Myanmar, their analysis would indicate that as social media use increases, conflicts such as between Buddhist and Muslim communities will worsen. But such an analysis would be applicable only insofar as social media becomes the dominant source of news and information. Will this be the case in Myanmar? To what degree will people rely on social media to access information and ideas about the world? People in Myanmar currently rely on a variety of sources for information, though some may also already be ‘epistemically secluded.’ The most basic lesson from the American context is that it will be important to pay careful attention to the ways that social media come into popular use in Myanmar: is it encouraging people to receive new kinds of information, from new sources that challenge them to consider their existing beliefs? Or are new technologies and media repeating and reinforcing what they already assume to be true?

At the same time, it is important not to conclude that the future is written in code and circuits. Such a conclusion would be profoundly disempowering, for it would be to say that upon the arrival and widespread use of social media, divisions and conflict in society are inevitable, unchangeable. Scholars from the field of history of technology have done ample work to show that such deterministic analyses never capture the fullness of history; a host of other factors beyond the technological will also influence the future for Myanmar. At the same time, however, these historians have shown time and again that technologies do have material effects.16 Technologies are designed to accomplish particular purposes and whether and how they are effective in achieving these ends, or other unforeseen ones, matters.17 This is the adage:

15 Amy Mitchell, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms,” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, November 14, 2013, http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-across-social-media-platforms/ (17 February 2014). 16 Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001). 17 Gabrielle Hecht, “Technology, Politics, and National Identity in France,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen, 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 257.

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‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’, and it may reflect, strengthen, perform and change existing power relationships.18

Myanmar is different from America in important ways. Unlike the US, it is experiencing the beginning of an abrupt upheaval in technology and media, one which will mark clearly a ‘before’ and ‘after’ moment in which mobile phones and the Internet arrive to successive parts of the country. Such changes were much older and less abrupt in the US. Other countries, however, have undergone more analogously swift change. Over just a ten-year period in India, for example, the population using a mobile phone went from 4 million to more than 750 million. In an ambitious exploration of the changes wrought by this rapid growth, the anthropologists Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron described mobile phones as ‘the most disruptive device to hit humanity since shoes,’19 because of the way they materially changed both everyday life and explicitly political undertakings. In the case of the latter, Jeffrey and Doron credit the surprising electoral victory of a previously marginalized political party with its ability to use new mobile phone networks. ‘The mobile or cell phone has radically changed the potential for political organization in India… because of India’s unique structures of privilege and social discrimination and the way in which cheap cell phones can subvert such structures. Mass dissemination of mobile phones has created possibilities that previously did not exist.’20

In another work on India, scholar Arvind Rajagopal drew similar conclusions about the development of Hindu nationalism, which he saw as project undertaken in light of new possibilities created by growth in print media and audio-visual technology.21 Rajagopal’s argument is not of cause and effect (‘television caused Hindu nationalism’), but that media re-shaped the context in which nationalism was being enacted.22 In Myanmar, then, it can be similarly said that political contests and conflicts are unfolding in a context that is being re-shaped by the full corpus of technologies that will arrive along with telecommunications networks, including mobile phones, the Internet, and social media. As during the time of Rajagopal’s research, narratives about Myanmar’s present and future are actively being enacted. The technological environment is not the only aspect of life for which clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ moments can be drawn. The state and society in Myanmar are in the midst of profound political conflicts, while also encountering contemporary globalization and the host of felt vulnerabilities

18 Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction: Authority, Political Machines, and Technology’s History,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 1, 11. 19 Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, The Great Indian Phone Book: How Cheap Mobile Phones Change Business, Politics and Daily Life (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), 2. 20 Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, “Mobile-izing: Democracy, Organization and India’s First ‘Mass Mobile Phone’ Elections,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 01 (2012): 64. 21 Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272. 22 Ibid., 1.

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that come with this.23 Myanmar is thus in a moment when narratives about the country’s past, present and future are open and being contested and remade as never before.

One important narrative is of the threats and antagonisms that Buddhist and Muslim communities face from each other. The efforts of organized political forces are necessary for such narratives to develop, but they are never enough alone. Public rhetoric, journal articles, propaganda, these things must also be reinforced through what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘little stories,’ those everyday experiences and conversations that repeat and illustrate the larger scripts of fear and antagonism.24 How, then, will new technologies and media interact with the development of these narratives? As people participate in the development of narratives of fear and antagonism, how will this be made different in light of new technologies? Technologies matter, as Hecht said, and just as with the television and mobile phone in India, new things will become possible, and more likely: people in Myanmar will encounter new ideas and information in new ways, more often, and more visually. They will be able to share and repeat this, and it will all be faster than ever before.

The analysis from the US is valuable, then, not because it shows that social media predetermines Myanmar’s future but because it highlights considerations for understanding, and acting on, the relationship between technologies and politics. This chapter will close by highlighting three such considerations for Myanmar.

Firstly, as increasing linkages are being drawn between social media and conflict in Myanmar, this is also being accompanied by calls for the Myanmar government and private companies such as Facebook to more strictly regulate discourses such as ‘hate speech.’ Such a response can appear warranted, particularly when individual Facebook posts are assigned blame for ‘sparking’ riots as in Mandalay during July. The above analysis, however, helps to indicate the radical insufficiency of such an approach. Sunstein and Pariser’s concerns are with the negative effects of epistemic seclusion, which they see as created by the technology. This is not just an issue of ‘hate speech.’ Pieces of information shared on Facebook and other platforms, including private and state-controlled media, may be unobjectionable in isolation but problematic in aggregate. Myanmar Buddhist Facebook users may see videos of violence committed by Muslims, and no corollary videos of violence against Muslims. They will feel no less the victim under threat than Muslim users inundated with similar information and imagery; and neither side will accept that the other side may be suffering, too. When discourses are obviously virulent and hateful they are more easily censored. But they are not always so easy to identify. Repeated selective sharing of stories about crimes by one side and not the other is not necessarily hate speech that can be censored, but it may nonetheless serve to confirm beliefs about Islam as inherently violent, even if this is never stated. The only way to censor such discourse would be with extremely broad restrictions on speech. Even in countries with extremely developed judicial systems, such a legal exercise is difficult to undertake without losing freedom of speech; it would be exceptionally difficult for Myanmar.

Secondly, while the American example helps indicate that censorship of objectionable discourses such as ‘hate speech’ is insufficient, it also complicates the idea that the opposite 23 On the relationship between feelings of vulnerability associated with globalization and violence against minorities, see Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2006). 24 Ibid., 91.

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presents a solution. Here again the wide gap between the US and Myanmar context makes the comparison instructive: American style protections for freedom of expression are among the strongest in the world. It is a rich media environment, literally and figuratively, where people have widespread access to information and communications technologies. Yet Sunstein and Pariser are still concerned that circulation of information in this environment is promoting divisions and extremism. The American example is thus a good lesson that the Internet and social media will not automatically lead to free and open exchange of ideas or promote harmony and mutual understanding.

Finally, while the idea of the ‘echo chamber’ can at times shade into technological determinism, it is a useful metaphor for conceptualizing strategies for promoting peace and reducing conflict. The ‘echo chamber’ conjures an image of a physical structure, prompting one to ask: how are its walls constructed? Answer: its walls are constructed by the interwoven mesh of those sources for information and ideas that people rely upon. In the US, Sunstein focused on walls constructed by those new forms of media available on the Internet, but even with the addition of offline sources the metaphor is still valuable. In Myanmar, if these walls are recognized, than this points towards a next step: deconstruct them. But the American example also indicates that simply making alternative information available is not be enough if it never makes it inside the chamber.

At the same time, the idea of an ‘echo chamber’ can also be a potential source of power, because it highlights the way that messages can become additionally persuasive as they reverberate and bounce off its walls. Sunstein closes Republic.Com, for example, by noting that this was an important part of anti-slavery and civil rights social movements.25 Seclusion can make people feel more comfortable to speak, particularly if they are expressing views that do not align with dominant viewpoints. This can be dangerous when it promotes extremism, but it can be useful in a context in which the dominant viewpoint is not in favour of peace and harmony. If repeating messages within secluded groups can help strengthen them, even where they differ from the majority, then the goal becomes drawing more people in. In this sense then the chamber is not to be shattered but expanded, on the hope that peace can lie within.

25 Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2009), 214.