The social media company said on Thursday that it was “treating the situation in Myanmar as an emergency”, adding that it “would significantly reduce the distribution of all content” on pages and profiles administered by the military, called Tatmadaw, “that continued to spread misinformation. “
This means that people who use the Facebook (FB) will see significantly less content from those pages in your News Feed. Facebook has tens of millions of users in Myanmar.
The company also “indefinitely suspended” government agencies in Myanmar from using special channels reserved for employees to send requests to Facebook to remove content, according to a blog post by Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s director of policies for emerging economies in Asia- Pacific region.
He said the company is “protecting content, including political speech, which allows the people of Myanmar to express themselves and show the world what is happening within their country”.
Accounts that Facebook is restricting include the Tatmadaw Information Team page, as well as one managed by Tatmadaw spokesman Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, according to the blog post.
Frankel added that Facebook would no longer recommend military pages to people, which makes it less likely that people will be directed to those pages.
The Facebook announcement comes just over a week after Myanmar’s army took power in a coup, arresting the country’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and several other key government figures.
After the coup, internet and news services were disrupted across the country, limiting people’s ability to obtain information about events. Facebook told CNN last week that its services were “stopped for some people”. The country later expanded the block to include Facebook owned by Facebook, as well as Twitter (TWTR).
The company said on Friday that the blockade order is still in effect. (This does not prevent people from accessing Facebook services using virtual private networks, or VPNs, which use encryption to disguise Internet traffic.)
Facebook is ubiquitous in Myanmar and, for many people, represents one of the main forms of access to the Internet.
Marzuki Darusman, president of a United Nations human rights investigation in Myanmar, once said that “social media is Facebook and Facebook is social media” in the country.
It also led to a great deal of scrutiny about how Facebook operates in the market, and in the past he admitted that he did not do enough to prevent his platform from being used to fuel political division and bloodshed.
Frankel, Facebook’s director of policies, said in his blog post that the company’s efforts to protect Myanmar’s citizens “are based on our work since 2018 to keep people safe and reduce the risk of political violence in Myanmar”.
In addition to removing misinformation, he said the company is also helping people who “reasonably” fear being detained to protect their Facebook accounts, among other measures.
– Rishi Iyengar, James Griffiths and Helen Regan contributed to this report.
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