Acknowledgements

This report would not have been made possible without the expertise, hard work, and dedication of research lead, Thant Sin Oo, for conducting the data collecting and analysing the findings. Research facilitator, Ye Min Thant, is also deserving of thanks for facilitating the discussions and co-authoring the report with Thant Sin Oo. Special thanks is given to Melyn McKay for providing the technical expertise on designing and implementing a rigorous research project. Phandeeyar would also like to acknowledge member of the Tech for Peace team for their valuable contribution to this initiative. Thank you to Kathy Win and Zaw Myo Min for their assistance in helping the focus group discussions that were central to the findings of this study, and Cho Thazin Aung and Thuzar Win for their help with the thankless task of typing up endless hours of transcripts. The Tech for Peace team would also like to thank all the other teams at Phandeeyar for supporting them in this project.  Finally, Phandeeyar would like to thank the French Embassy in Myanmar for the generous funding that made this research and report possible.

Author:
THANT SIN OO

Co-author:
Ye Min Thant

Advisor:
Melyn McKay

Table of Contents

Introduction

Key Findings & Recommendations

Methodology

Analysis

Mobile Phones & Everyday Life

Infrastructure doesn’t buy access: Are data costs keeping Myanmar offline?

Mobile phones are today’s teacher to young adults, is this a good thing?

Is our mobile phone a doorway to social worlds that we may not reach offline otherwise?

Facebook & the digital world in Myanmar

Facebook is the internet, or is it?

What is a fake account anyway?

Facebook: can't live with it, can't live without it?

Facebook gives us access to information at our fingertips; how much of it do we trust?

Safe Internet

Digital Skills: Where should you learn it or should you bother?

Facebook or Fakebook: should we only post when we are happy?

Mobile & Women

Is digital harassment the new wolf whistle?

Conclusion

 

Introduction

In late 2017, Phandeeyar conducted small-scale, qualitative research on Facebook use in Myanmar. The findings of that research were insightful. For instance, the research suggested that:

• Hate speech is often met with mockery (using the ‘ha ha’ reaction). Because Facebook’s algorithm translates engagement into greater visibility, this behaviour serves to unintentionally extend the reach of the most inflammatory and dangerous online content.
• Direct sharing is not the only option to share (copy + paste is preferred). As a result, it’s nearly impossible to track content’s actual reach. This behaviour also forces Myanmar Facebook users to rely on other means of evaluating the origins of content, particularly, reading comments from other users.
• Communities around the country know to question the veracity of online content (but few have the skills to do so). Across the country, communities shared a pervasive sense that Facebook was both the best and worst means of staying informed.

Though the findings of the research were never published, they were used to improve the impact of existing campaigns and to advocate for changes to Facebook’s community management practices in Myanmar. Having thus proven the value of research-based programming and advocacy, Phandeeyar resolved to conduct another qualitative study, this time broadening the inquiry to explore a wider variety of online experiences, perceptions, skills, and behaviours. Between October 2018 and March 2019, Phandeeyar’s Tech for Peace team conducted 23 focus groups with 137 participants in 6 locations including: Hlaing Thar Yar, Yangon, Meikhtila, Taunggyi, Kalay, and Hpa-an. The content in this report is the product of that research and aims to collate the data collected in support of Phandeeyar’s own programming. This report will also serve as the basis for further external communications and publications, which the team hopes will help the civic tech sector, civil society organizations, and donors  better understand digital culture in Myanmar and its implications for policy and programming. Ultimately, Phandeeyar hope that by sharing these findings, Myanmar’s general public will be better able to safely navigate an increasingly diverse online ecosystem whilst making the most of the many opportunities it provides.

 

Key Findings and Recommendations

Mobile Phones and Everyday Life

The popularity of an app solely depends on its utility and how data economical it is. While Facebook and Messenger are, without a doubt, the most popular, Youtube, Tiktok, various video downloaders, and Zapya were also commonly in use.

• Civil Society/NGOs who are doing literacy and/or public education programming can improve their reach by providing mobile phone apps that allow users to cheaply download content to their phones for offline use.
• Offer learners incentives by providing mobile data or unlimited wifi support.

Apart from phone calling, ‘entertainment’ is the reason most people acquire smartphones. Videos are the most popular content type. Given the larger file size of audio-visual files, users develop their own ways of minimizing data cost.

• Those who are doing public education programming should incorporate an entertainment element into their curriculum in either video or graphic format. For example, mobile learning programmes could include instruction or teaching videos that can be downloaded onto the phone and shared with other users
• Think about how existing television education programmes can be adapted to mobile.

Humorous content is the most popular (and potentially successful) online.

• Social entertainment or social change campaigners should use playful creativity with elements of humour to gain online engagement. For instance,  popular culture mimics and memes easily go viral.

Although smartphones are seen as a distraction for high school students, for young adults and university students they are an essential aid for self-improvement. Most new users come online after they pass 11th grade.

• CSOs and NGOs interested in education or youth issues should use popular platforms such as Facebook and Youtube to offer learning courses on a variety of subjects.

There is more to social networking on smartphones. Facebook helps small businesses, professionals and civil society in their networking and communication. For many in Myanmar, Facebook is Google, LinkedIn, Tinder, Tumblr, and Reddit, all  in one.

• Facebook can help students, shopkeepers, and many others to get ahead. However, young women, especially of low digital literacy, are sometimes hindered by prevalent online harassment or cultural prejudice from using internet and social media. Gender should be mainstreamed into any programming with an online element. The private sector may find opportunities in designing female-friendly ICT, for instance, digital platforms with strict (and thoroughly implemented) guidelines on harassment.

Facebook and the Digital World in Myanmar

Contrary to common assumptions about the prevalence of passive information consumption, Myanmar mobile users practice active searching. They find the information that they need on Facebook rather than Google. People use Facebook as the internet because it is more responsive to search and thus offers better quality content. Social networking is secondary.

• If you want your content seen, make sure it is searchable.

Facebook accounts are not linked to identity. They are disposable, and many users make as many accounts as they like based on what they need. There are many reasons why people use different identities on Facebook. It does not always suggest they have malicious intent.

• CSO/NGO and advocacy networks should rethink the way they address the prevalence of so-called ‘fake accounts’ - particularly, as it pertains to Facebook advocacy efforts.

Even though participants were increasingly aware of the prevalence of negativity and misleading content on Facebook, they have developed their own ways of curating their experience.

• Information literacy, empathy, and safety tips will all help users improve their ability to create positive digital ecosystems for themselves by making them (even) smarter social media users.

Participants put a lot of trust in some of the channels/pages related to their different topics of interest. Young adults learn through reading and watching on mobile phones for self-improvement.

• Build audience trust on your existing pages by offering higher-quality content. Regularly update with new posts. Consider providing helpful tips and learning opportunities related to your topics.
• Invest in comment monitoring and community management to ensure bad actors are not derailing discussion. Participants sometimes evaluate new sources of information by reading the comments.

Safe Internet

Mobile phones are not seen as an extension of a person’s digital self. Many participants expressed concern about password protecting their phones because it might mean that other people could not use them in times of emergency.

• Western notions of privacy may not map to Myanmar directly. When thinking about security, keep in mind that multiple users may access the internet from the same device.

Most Facebook users have been exposed to a barrage of negative online content, as a result, they prefer when other people post positive things on social media.

• However, this tendency toward policing negative emotions or opinions online may contribute to a sense of alienation or inadequacy in people dealing with difficult circumstances. Mental health materials should be made available and easily searchable.

 

Methodology

collapse to read methodology

Over a six-month period, the social study conducted 23 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with 137 participants (78 women and 59 men) in 6 locations: Hlaing Thar Yar, Yangon, Meikhtila, Taunggyi, Kalay, and Hpa-an. Phandeeyar used purposive and snowball sampling to recruit participants. The sampling criteria emphasised diversity, and thus ensured participants were balanced in gender, educational background, and age.

In October, the team conducted a pilot study with three FGDs in Hlaing Thar Yar. Based on the data collected, the team revised the questionnaire and the method of inquiry. Over the next five months, the team visited places in Yangon, Meikhtila, Taunggyi, Kalay and Hpa-an to conduct 20 more FGDs. These cities were selected to leverage Phandeeyar’s existing network.

Each discussion group typically consisted of four to five users, while a few discussions were joined by as many as nine people. Each discussion took 60 to 90 minutes depending on participants’ engagement. The language of discussion was Myanmar.

Realising after the pilot that the mobile users’ behaviours and experiences were highly gendered, the team decided to separate men and women moving forward. The questionnaire was designed around four different themes, which included common questions that carried through each of the FGDs:

• Digital literacy,
• Digital culture,
• Interaction with digital technology, and
• Safety and concerns.

In order to achieve a good mix of digital literacy and socio-economic backgrounds, the team tried to target both urban and peri-urban backgrounds¹. Although the majority of the participants turned out to be college students, our sample was otherwise diverse in regards to occupations: teachers, farmers, factory workers, brokers, business owners, nurses, and community centre staff, all participated in the study.

Distribution of gender and (digital) access  background - total 23 FGDs

City	Urban	Peri-urban
Hlaing Thar Yar	1 mixed group	1 women’s group, 1 men’s group
Yangon	2 mixed groups	1 women’s group, 1 men’s group
Meikhtila	1 women’s group, 2 men’s groups	1 women’s group
Taunggyi	1 men’s group	2 women’s groups, 1 men’s group
Kalay	1 women’s group, 1 men’s group	1 women’s group, 1 men’s group
Hpa-an	2 women’s groups, 2 men’s groups	-

Limitations
Given the nature of snowball sampling, which was used for recruitment, trust building between the researchers and participants was sometimes challenging. What is more, in order to respect participant privacy, researchers refrained from asking questions related to very private or sensitive topics, which included questions about ethnic identity. As such, the data cannot be disaggregated by ethnicity.

In some of the focus groups, the team was able to ask the participants to share their phone screens, which enabled the researchers to observe actual usage. However, this was not possible in every FGD as participants were sometimes reluctant and the team prioritised their comfort.

In addition, as the research was exploratory in nature, the team did not always adhere strictly to the questions set out in the questionnaire, but rather, used them as a guideline to encourage a free flowing conversation. Where conversation fixated on a certain topic and/or ran over time, the team truncated certain questions from each theme in order to save time.

The method itself introduces additional confounding factors into the analysis of if and/or how offline social settings influence online use. Although this research tried to probe the everyday digital lives of ordinary citizens, we presume that users who are part of the digital leapfrog in the past 4 - 6 years fairly represent a good majority of the new wave of mobile users across Myanmar and the emerging digital cultures with it. Therefore, some common characteristics of the users may form the basis that shapes the way we formulate our understanding. The majority of our participants shared the following characteristics:

• Currently do not own nor use a laptop (nor have they extensively used it in the past);
• Use android phones (mostly older versions of Android OS);
• Cannot skilfully navigate user settings on their devices;
• Are currently connected with mobile 4G and have good reception;
• Have no convenient access to WIFI or unlimited data.

Our method of inquiry in social research represents only a glimpse into people's interactions with mobile phones and the role they play in the social milieu.  Like any other qualitative research, our data is not representative of Myanmar in general, but rather, offers new perspectives into digital-social dynamics. It goes without saying, that these findings do not represent all types or subcultures of digital users, nor can any generalisation be made to all users in Myanmar.

We present our findings in the form of questions that we hope will productively challenge assumptions that are widely accepted as true. Moreover, Phandeeyar hopes that the study findings give us, and our readers, deeper insight (as opposed to broad data) that might suggest avenues and lines of inquiry for further research. We present almost all the findings with little interpretation. Though our understanding of some social and digital phenomena may be shallow, given the limitations of the method itself (semi-structured discussion); by presenting all findings, rather than leaving some out because of insufficient data, we hope the report will spark curiosity for further research.

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[1] We define “urban background” as a group of participants who have easier or more access to mobile shops and digital services, and higher social awareness of digital technology, comparatively to “peri-urban” participants of the same city or location.

 

Analysis

Mobile Phones and Everyday Life

Infrastructure doesn’t buy access: Are data costs keeping Myanmar offline?

Each focus group discussion began with a question: how do people in Myanmar use their phones in daily life? In addition to making phone calls, we wanted to know about their most used/useful applications. Our focus was not to identify any specific applications, but to understand the underlying social factors that determine why and how people make choices about what to put on their phone and how often they will use it. While participants had no particular difficulty in acquiring a mobile phone and a 4G connection, we learned that having access to a device does not always mean users have full access to the internet. In particular, data cost was an important factor that shaped what applications were popular and when and how they were being used. This led the team to ask about the culture of file sharing, different ways of minimizing data cost, and other social perceptions around data cost.
​
​For instance, one participant in Kalay reported that he bypassed data cost on Facebook by screenshotting news articles. That way, he could come back to reading them later when his data was turned off.

#PopularApps - In participants’ everyday language, the word လိုင်းပေါ်တက်တယ်/ line paw tat tal– “going online”– is synonymous with “active on Facebook”. Although Facebook and its Messenger are, undeniably, the most popular apps across all regions of Myanmar, data cost deters their actual online usage. As such, people are very often using their phones offline to read or watch content they have previously downloaded.

​After Facebook, the next most popular apps include: Zapya, Vidmate and MX Player.

While Facebook is favored for the diversity of its offering, including availability of Myanmar content and information, web surfing, blogging, and video watching– for many participants, Youtube could rival Facebook in terms of interest and entertainment if its usage were less expensive. Given the high cost of data for video content, participants in this study reported that they preferred to download from Facebook or YouTube using downloader apps which decrease the bandwidth requirements of streaming. This means downloading videos from the internet is never seen as piracy; rather, participants saw these apps as a means of accessing video content that would otherwise be out of reach because there is no WIFI or unlimited data at home. Popular apps used for this purpose include: Vidmate, Tubemate, or FB HD Downloader, and Zapya (used for file sharing). Such apps were present on the majority of participants’ phones. However, participants with access to unlimited data were much less likely to use these apps, preferring to stream instead.

There are, of course, other niche apps for users of different interests and geolocations:

• Despite users’ preference for Facebook Messenger, Viber is, nevertheless, still being used widely for social connection and for work communication.
• WeChat is popular among users in Taunggyi, particularly those who have business relations with people from China.
• For game-playing users, apps such as PUPG and Mobile Legend are popular with men. Candy Crush is popular with women.
• Dictionary apps are also mentioned frequently, and are popular for learning.

Tiktok appears to be on the rise; users like its entertainment value and social broadcasting elements. Its straightforward functionality also contributes to its popularity, especially among younger users. Instagram tends to be seen as “part-elitist”, an app only made for “beautiful" or “cele” users. “Cele”, in this context, refers to persons perceived to be popular within their own circle or beyond on social media, but does not necessarily refer only to celebrities.

#Videos - Apart from communication, the top reason people buy mobile phones is for entertainment, with the internet as a doorway to various types of content. In every focus group, participants reported that they most commonly used their phones to watch videos.

When it comes to entertainment, comedy is the preferred content type. Many participants mentioned that they frequently search online for funny posts, stories, and videos. This helps to explain why funny/meme groups on Facebook are extremely popular. Facebook has Myanmar pages people can use to discover and watch new videos.

#FileSharing - Given the importance of mobile entertainment, especially given the heavy data-usage of video watching, it’s no surprise Zapya is an extremely popular app. Its broad usage is developing a culture of file sharing among social groups.

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When I was in the university, as soon as I reached the classroom, I would tell [my friends]: everybody open Zapya! And then we created copies of movies [we had on our phones].
​

• 21 years old college student (woman), Hpa-an

[တက္ကသိုလ်] ကျောင်းတက်တုန်းကဆိုရင် အခန်းထဲရောက်ရင် ‘ဟဲ့ Zapyaဖွင့်’ ဆိုပြီး ဇာတ်လမ်း ကူးကြတယ်။

Many participants mentioned watching television series and movies on their mobile phones. There are three avenues people can use to do this: copy content from friends through Zapya; download lower quality video off Facebook or YouTube using a downloader app; or stream/download when wifi connection is conveniently accessible (generally, public WIFI on university campuses or in commercial/business spaces).

#DataCost - Younger users’ online time is often determined by the data allowance they receive from parents. Sometimes, spending too much on mobile data is seen as a negative behaviour– particularly where too much time and money is spent on recreation or “slacking”. As a result, young users are often embarrassed to admit how much time they spend online. For instance, when we asked participants from Kalay and Hpa-an how much they spent per month on data, they laughed (in a shy manner), stayed quiet, or lied (provided illogical or inconsistent answers).

Mobile phones are today’s teacher to young adults, is this a good thing?   

Since Myanmar experienced a “digital connectivity revolution” around 2014, with user numbers beginning to soar high starting from urban regions, we assumed that the majority of mobile users today started using phones around that time. But it became interesting when we factored in user’s age to understand their first mobile phone experience. As many of our participants were young adults and college students, we discussed when they first got their hands on a smartphone and what benefits they thought it brings.

#FirstMobilePhone - For our youngest participants, passing their matriculation exam is a rite of passage into digital presence; many buy their phones right after passing the 11th grade. There are only a few exceptions to this rule, for example, those who are well-off or living away from their parents or relatives. However, young people may share a phone with their parents or other family members before they graduate high school.

Early mobile adopters, who started as early as 2013, preferred using Viber because it was easier to sign up for than Facebook. Mobile users without prior digital skills needed to ask friends for help or pay a phone shop to open their first Facebook account for them. Only once their digital skills had advanced could they figure out how to open another account by themselves.

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I was 17 when I started using the internet. After I graduated from high school. [...] When I started using it, I shared everything I saw [on Facebook]. I shared even if it’s just the photo of a snake. [...] When I started using mobile phone, I didn’t know how to use Google. I was struggling. I thought of going to a mobile shop. Then I bought Facebook account with 5000 kyats. Some people even bought with 10,000 kyats!

21 years old college student (man), Yangon

အင်တာနက်စသုံးတာ အသက် (၁၇) မှာ စသုံးတယ်။ ဆယ်တန်းပြီးပေါ့။ [...] စသုံးတုန်းက တွေ့သမျှ 'ရှယ်'တာပါပဲ။ မြွေတွေ့လည်း 'ရှယ်'တယ်။ [...] ဆယ်တန်းပြီးပြီးချင်း ဖုန်းစသုံးတော့ Google မသုံးတတ်ဘူး။ တိုင်ပတ်နေတယ်။ အခုပဲ အင်တာနက်ဆိုင်မှာ သွားပြရတော့ မလိုလို။ Facebook account ကို သူငယ်ချင်းနားကနေ ၅၀၀၀ နဲ့ ဝယ်သုံးတယ်။ တစ်ချို့ဆို (၁)သောင်းလောက်နဲ့ ဝယ်သုံးတယ်။

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Mostly it’s students who bought accounts. I couldn’t afford to buy an account. So I downloaded a dictionary app. I translated the words to create a Facebook account because it was all written in English. I first opened email account and then got Facebook account. Later I lost that account.

18 years old college student (man), Yangon

အများဆုံးကတော့ ကျောင်းသားတွေပဲ ဝယ်သုံးတာ။ ကျနော်ဆို ဝယ်မသုံးနိုင်လို့ dictionary ဒေါင်းပြီး [ဘာသာပြန်ပြီး] FB account လုပ်တယ်။ အင်္ဂလိပ်လိုတွေပဲ ရေးထားတယ်။ ကျနော် Email ဖွင့်တယ်။ Account ရသွားတယ်။ နောက်ကြတော့ Facebook account ပျောက်သွားတယ်။

#SelfImprovement - Many users seemed to recognise a need for younger users to reach a certain level of maturity before mobile phones could reasonably be used. And yet, almost all participants believed that the access to information, knowledge, and self-directed learning provided by the internet was a net-good for users of all ages.

College students, in particular, acknowledged mobile phones’ utility and aid to their studies in higher education, including: ability to develop useful skills; D.I.Y. and tutorials from YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook pages; and opportunity to look for courses, training, extracurricular classes, and scholarships.

Mobile book reading was also discussed as a benefit of digital technology, particularly as users can download many books not otherwise available in Myanmar and/or share books with friends using Zapya.

For teenagers, mobile phones and the internet are not generally seen as a learning aid (yet), but rather, as a distraction from school lessons and examination studies. As a result, many families opt not to buy teens a phone until they have passed the matriculation exam.

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• Original

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It was grade 10 [when I started using it]. Actually my home bought me as a birthday present since grade 8, but I didn’t know how to use the internet then. Only in grade 10 I learnt how to use Facebook. Then, I stopped using the phone in grade 11 (final high school year) and used it again after grade 11. Because I didn’t know I could use it for learning. Only whem I'm in college, I realized that. [During grade 11], my home[parents] took the phone from me. I asked for it again [after the matriculation exam].

​18 years old college student (woman), Hpa-An

အဲ့တုန်းက (၉)တန်း။​ အမှန်တော့ အိမ်က မွေးနေ့လက်ဆောင်အနေနဲ့ ဝယ်ပေးတာက (၇)တန်းတည်းက။ ဒါပေမဲ့ အဲ့တုန်းက အင်တာနက် မသုံးသေးလို့ (၉)တန်းကျမှ [စသုံးတတ်တာ]။ (၉)တန်းကျတော့ Facebook တွေဘာတွေ သုံးတတ်နေပြီ။ (၁၀) တန်းကျတော့ ဖုန်းသုံးတာရပ်ထားတာပေါ့။ (၁၀) တန်းပြီးမှ [ပြန်သုံးတာ]။​ အဲ့တုန်းက စာအတွက် သုံးရမယ်လို့ မသိဘူးလေ၊ တက္ကသိုလ်ရောက်မှ သုံရမယ်မှန်းသိတာ။ [၁၀ တန်းတုန်း]က အိမ်က သိမ်းသွားတာပေါ့။ ပြီးမှ ပြန်တောင်းရတာ။

Is our mobile phone a doorway to social worlds that we may not reach offline otherwise?

We generally accept that mobile phones and social networks facilitate social connection with friends and family with greater ease. However, we know very little about how users venture into the different social spheres that mobile phones have unlocked for them. Especially when it comes to work related to staying safe online, these findings provided much needed insight into how people connect with strangers (that they have not come to meet offline yet)– be it for hobby, romantic, business, or professional motives.

#MobileGaming - Although it is relatively less common for women users, playing mobile games takes precedence over using social networking for young men. Male participants in our study said mobile games occupy a significant amount of their mobile phone time. Sometimes, male gamers use a different identity profile on Facebook to play online, read about gaming, or connect with other gamers.

#Mobile4Work - For people working in non-corporate culture, mobile phones are also a workstation from which they build their network. Many of the participants reported that they did not use email services, such as Gmail, to send and receive professional communication. Instead, they relied on applications such as Viber and  Facebook Messenger, and in Taunggyi, WeChat.

Participants in Taunggyi said that civil society members use Facebook Messenger for work related communication and rarely open their Gmail to check for emails. Facebook groups are also used to communicate among community members. Updates are given in private groups rather than by phone or emails.

Some urban youth participants mentioned that Facebook was a good place to find job opportunities. Those on the hunt for work often use their Facebook profiles as their portfolio, so profiles become an important site for personal branding. Participants from civil society also noted that they upload activity photos to Facebook as a means of updating their network and gaining trust. As such, Facebook sometimes functions like LinkedIn, connecting people with professional contacts and helping them to keep up-to-date with issues and opportunities that affect their work.  

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For our volunteer blood donation group, we need [Facebook account]. Sometimes we ran out of donated blood. But there are groups of volunteer donors. And as we normally post photos of people donating blood, it’s easier [for them] to find out about us. We build trust.

38 year old social worker (woman), Taunggyi

ကျွန်မတို့ ပရဟိတ သွေးအလှူရှင် သင်းအနေနဲတော့ [ဖေ့စ်ဘုတ် အကောင့်] လိုအပ်တယ်။ တစ်ခါတစ်လေကြရင် ကိုယ့်မှာရှိတဲ့ သွေးက ကုန်သွားပြီ။ လိုင်းပေါ်မှာဆိုရင် သွေးလှူတဲ့ အသင်းတွေရှိတယ်။ ကိုယ့်ကလည်း လိုင်းပေါ်မှာ သွေးလှူတဲ့ လူတွေအကြောင်း မှတ်တမ်းတင်ပေးတော့ လိုင်းပေါ်မှာ ရှာရတာလွယ်တယ်။ ယုံကြည်မှုတစ်ခု ရသွားတယ်ပေါ့။

#Facebook4LocalBusiness - When it comes to business, it is not just people selling products through their Facebook profile; trade agents benefit from learning up-to-date market prices, news, and trends related to their products, for instance automobile retail or land sales.

Private groups of local merchants and trade persons can also use groups as a channel for publishing pictures of products and their sales prices.

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I don’t post photos on Facebook myself. My manager does it. Once my manager bought a piece of land, I signed it. After my manager created sections of the land, he uploaded the photos to the [Facebook] group. Then, the other brokers came and asked for prices.

52 years old broker (woman), Taunggyi

ကျနော်ကတော့ Facebook မှာ ပုံမတင်ဘူးပေါ့။ မန်နေဂျာက အကုန်လုပ်တယ်။ မန်နေဂျာက  ဒီမြေကွက်ကို သူဝယ်တယ်ဆိုရင် ကျနော် လက်မှတ်ထိုးပေးလိုက်တယ်။ မန်နေဂျာကတော့ ကိုယ့်မြေကွက် အကွက်ဖော်ပေးသွားပြီရင် သူက group ထဲ ပုံတင်ပေးလိုက်တယ်။ ဒါဆိုရင် ပွဲစားတွေက ဈေးမေးလာတယ်။

The research team also found several cases of people using their Facebook profile to sell products and connect with others to create a small-scale online shop. According to participants, deals were done through Facebook Messenger, with money exchanged either in advance, via bank transfer, or in person when delivering the product. There is a mixed view on how reliable this type of business can be; although participants said that they bought online because many products are not available in physical shops, some said the products do not live up to the quality that was advertised online, and they felt cheated. Some participants also said they found such advertisements annoying on their social media feeds.

#Facebook&SocialCommunity - In Taunggyi and Kalay, Facebook is not just social connection of close friends and family, but it also functions as a social sphere to learn about events, including obituaries from community members living in a distant place. In Kalay in particular, participants mentioned that Chin community would sometimes send condolences or felicitation to their community members on Facebook, where unreliable and expensive ground transportation, to say nothing of sheer distance, makes it difficult to connect in person.

#Facebook4RomanticLife - Online or Facebook courting is common among men and women living in rural and peri-urban areas as well as with migrant workers living abroad. Online courting is the most common and happens primarily between people across different regions. The primary reason for such cross-geographical connection, as enabled by Facebook, is that the medium allows users to sometimes lie about themselves [possibly as a way to impress the other person by misrepresenting oneself before they make a deeper connection, rather than being exposed easily or soon, if they were geographically close]. Some participants expressed concerns about the dating culture, and the issue of unsafe online dating was mentioned more frequently by peri-urban focus groups.

Naturally, although this type of behaviour enabled cheating or extramarital affairs (there were many reports and rumours of just such activities) participants also recounted happier stories of inter-regional romantic connections that blossomed into healthy offline partnerships.

A typical relationship like this involves talking online without meeting in person over an extended period of time, sometimes years, until they finally arrange to meet outside and then “elope” almost immediately. Although Facebook is the most common platform used for finding potential partners, bantering, or developing online-only romantic relationships, conversations can also take place on other messaging platforms such as Viber.

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As girls stay at home most of the time, they meet their partner online [Facebook], and then they ended up eloping. They got married by talking to people from other cities on their phone. Sometimes their partner is from Yangon. For some, they never met outside but only talked on the phone before they eloped. They don’t think; they run away if they like each other.

Peri-urban women group, Meikhtila

မိန်းကလေးတွေက အိမ်မှာ နေတာများတော့ လိုင်းကနေပဲ တွေ့ပြီး ခိုးပြေးကြတာပါပဲ။ တခြားမြို့က လူတွေနဲ့ ဖုန်းထဲကနေ စကားပြောရင်း အိမ်ထောင်ကြကုန်တယ်။ တချို့ဆို ရန်ကုန်ကနေ။ တချို့ဆို အပြင်မှာ မတွေ့ဖူးပဲ ဖုန်းပြောရင်း လိုက်ပြေးကြတာ။ သူတို့က မစဉ်းစားဘူး ကြိုက်ရင် လိုက်ပြေးတာပဲ။

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For me, I met him on [Facebook] Messenger, and we eloped after we talked for 2 years. The boy is from Yangon. His looks the same as his photos online. We planned it before we ran away. We met at the bus terminal to run away.

Peri-urban women group, Meikhtila

ညီမတော့ သူနဲ့ Messenger ကနေ တွေ့တာ နှစ်နစ်ကြာတော့ ခိုးပြေးတယ်။ ကောင်လေးက ရန်ကုန်က၊ နောက်ကြတော့ ခိုးပြေးတယ်။ အပြင်ကရုပ်နဲ့ အွန်လိုင်းက ရုပ်က အတူတူပါပဲ။ ခိုးပြေးမယ်လို့ ပြောထားပြီးမှ ခိုးပြေးတာ။ ကားဂိတ်ကို လာကြပြီး ခိုးပြေးကြတာပဲ။

The use of online spaces for courtship sometimes leads to harassment, particularly when one party is not interested or does not consent. Many women users have had bad experiences with male users who become “rude”. According to participants in this study, such exchanges often included: swearing; sending unsolicited nude photos; calling the number registered on Facebook, often to make threats; and in the worst cases, photoshopping images posted on a Facebook profile to make the female user appear promiscuous.

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So my friend was courting online with a guy from Nay Pyi Taw, who was working in Malaysia. Later she rejected the guy online that she no longer liked him. Then he gave her troubles. The boy from Malaysia sent his friends to harass her. But later they broke up.

• Peri-urban women group, Meikhtila
  

ညီမသူငယ်ချင်းပေါ့ online ကနေ ကြိုက်တာ၊ ကောင်လေးက နေပြည်တော်က၊ မလေးရှားမှာ အလုပ်လုပ်တာ။ online မှာ ကိုယ်က မကြိုက်တော့လို့ ငြင်းလိုက်တော့ ဟိုဘက်က ကောင်းလေးက လိုက်ပြဿနာရှာတာပေါ့။ မလေးရှားမှာနေတဲ့ ကောင်းလေးက သူ့ သူငယ်ချင်းတွေ လွှတ်ပြီး ပြသာနာရှာခိုင်းတယ်။ နောက်ကြတော့ ပျက်သွားကြတာပဲ။

The common negative outcomes of online courtship reported by participants included:

• Finding out later that men were already married or had children in another location,
• Minors getting married before reaching the legal age for (court) marriage,
• Being unemployed without a place to stay (being abandoned by family members because of relationship),
• Quick divorce or break up, with girls and women being left behind,
• Broken marriages and families (married husbands/fathers running away with younger women with whom they have affairs online).

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My friend had never been in a relationship before. Her online partner was from another village and he lied to her that he was single. Once they fell in love online, she asked him to ask for marriage [from her parents]. And, of course, [her parents] didn’t agree as they found out he had a wife. But later they eloped after he left his wife. She even had to take care of the kids from the first wife. But in the end her parents took her back.

Peri-urban women group, Meikhtila

ညီမ သူငယ်ချင်းဆို တခါမှ ရည်းစားမထားဘူးပေါ့။ တစ်ဘက်ရွာက သူက လူပျိုဆိုပြီး လိမ်ကြိုက်တာ။ လိုင်းပေါ်မှာ ကြိုက်နေရင်း လာတောင်းခိုင်းတော့ မိန်းမရှိမှန်း သိတော့ သဘောမတူဘူးပေါ့။ နောက်ကြတော့ ခိုးပြေးကြတယ်။ ပထမမိန်းမကို ပစ်ထားပြီး ညီမ သူငယ်ချင်းနဲ့ လာယူတယ်။ ပထမမိန်းမရဲ့ ကလေးတွေပါ ထိန်းလိုက်ရတာပေါ့။ နောက်ကြတော့ မိဘတွေက ပြန်ခေါ်ထားတာ။

There are a variety of reasons why people in Myanmar sometimes have limited opportunities for finding or initiating a romantic relationship in the real world; cultural, economic, or geographic constraints can all create very real barriers. Facebook– where millions of Myanmar users are connected– offers an opportunity for people to find romantic partners despite these limitations. These digitally-mediated connections are also unique in that they often connect people from different cities, sometimes even across ethnic lines².

Facebook account sharing between couples is common; only a few participants in this research emphasised privacy. It is easier for young men, to have multiple separate accounts, which their female romantic partner may or may not know about. We will discuss in detail the gender differences related to having digital skills and different reasons why men are more likely to have multiple accounts in the following sections.

Conclusions - When we design intervention programmes, we often overlook data cost as factor that decides a selling point to potential users. Apart from some urban middle class users, data cost may be a big barrier to making the most of the internet and it shapes the way people interact with mobile phones in both rural and urban areas. Participants prefer applications that allow them to search for content, and at the same time, spend minimal data or keep content downloaded for offline access. Young adults see mobile phones as facilitator of self-development, and yet, the heavy data cost of watching videos for learning deters them from making full use.

We also learned that entertainment is the main reason people use mobile phones and that people develop a culture of file sharing during their social interactions to cope with data cost. Future research should explore the ways in which mobile phone use has (or has not) replaced traditional TV watching, particularly how the ability to “personalise” content online, and the lower cost of ownership affect consumer choices. By answering this question, CSO and NGOs could better understand how television education programming can be adapted to reach mobile-only populations more successfully.

It is generally known that social media allow users to create and interact in digital communities, regardless of whether such virtual social connections cross to the offline world. It was unexpected for us to learn the large extent to which Facebook in Myanmar connects strangers across regions into romantic relationships, rendering physical, and sometimes social, difficulties irrelevant. Our particular recommendation to organizations is that this online social trend calls into question of staying safe online and (offline), which can no longer be overlooked, specifically for women. Moving forward, it would also be beneficial to understand how LGBTQ communities use mobile technology for dating and bypassing traditional social barriers.

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[2] Given the sensitivities around these questions, we did not inquire about religion.

 

Facebook and the digital world in Myanmar

Facebook is the internet, or is it?

When we discussed the internet with participants, the conversation naturally turned to Facebook. Given the importance of Facebook in Myanmar, we spent time trying to understand Facebook culture. The common catchphrase, ‘Facebook is the internet of Myanmar’, has been so often repeated as to become truth. However, even if it is in some ways true, we wondered, to what extent? It is patronising to assume that people in Myanmar only use Facebook as the internet because they do not have digital skills or because they only consume information passively. We want to challenge the way people think about Facebook’s role in Myanmar and support it with better social explanations derived from research. To gather this data, we probed our participants about their primary motives for joining and using Facebook.

#SocialNetworking - Surprisingly, the research team found that social networking is not the primary reason why most users have Facebook. Rather, most participants claimed that they used Facebook principally for surfing the internet and for entertainment. Not all but most participants were clear that they rarely open the Facebook app solely to see what their friends are up to, rather, this happens passively once they’ve logged in for other reasons.

Participants were not using Facebook to connect with family members, either, preferring to keep their social details private for fear of being judged negatively by their elders. As such, it was common for participants to claim they either do not accept family members requests to connect, or to create a different account to connect for more parent-approved sharing. As it is culturally common for young users to live with their family, they do not feel the need to connect to those they are physically close to anyway.

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I used to have just one Facebook account. Now I have a separate account to add my teachers and then another account for my parents. And one for my friends. I blocked my relatives though.

22 years old college student (woman), Hpa-An

အရင်က ဒီတိုင်းပဲ အရင်ဖွင့်ထားတာပဲ။ အခု တစ်ကောင့်က သီးသန့် ဆရာတွေ မိဘတွေ အတွက် ထားတယ်။ တစ်ကောင့်ကတော့ သူငယ်ချင်းတွေအတွက်။ အမျိုးတွေကိုတော့ Block ထားတယ်။

Through the focus group discussions it became clear that the social networking aspect of Facebook has shifted to chat groups, stories, or Facebook Messenger groups, where people can share more personal details with a select group of people. While Facebook Messenger groups keep close circles of people connected and communicating, Facebook groups are more often used to share information, learn more about hobbies, or discuss interests. Some types of Facebook pages and groups most commonly used by participants in this research included:

• Local town news groups
• Celebrity fan and news
• Movies and TV series groups
• Gamers groups
• Alumni networks
• Students/alumni groups.

Other groups, such as groups for food, travels, e-books, music, religion, health, fitness/sports, aesthetics, language studies, and adult content, were also mentioned, but less frequently.

Degree of activeness on social media (Facebook) may depend on the following interconnected factors:

• availability or amount of free/leisure time;
• demographic (student or working; wealth status);
• whether required to connect to the internet at work or for work related activity;
• affordability of data or access to unlimited WIFI; and
  
• the extent to which being used to regularly using smart phone, social media and internet (older users).

#InternetSearching - Many described access to information as the most positive aspect of the internet. However, as far as surfing and searching is concerned, the lack of Myanmar content, and the problem of inconsistent fonts, mean Google rarely yields satisfactory results.

Many of our participants knew about Google (and how to use it properly on their mobiles) but tended to use it only to search in English. Non-English speakers were less likely to use Google, in part because most prefer to search in Zawgyi³.

On Facebook, there is an abundance of Myanmar language content that can be searched in either Zawgyi or Unicode using the app. This shows that Myanmar language participants, especially users of Zawgyi, choose Facebook at least in part, because it facilitates information seeking. When it comes to internet searching, Facebook is the de facto Google of Myanmar.

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[3] Zawgyi is a widely used font system in Myanmar that does not conform to international Unicode standards.

What is a fake account anyway?

Facebook typically demands that users use their real identity on their platform. But there is more to social networking than connection with friends and family on Facebook in Myanmar. Sometimes, Facebook functions as a micro-blogging platform like Tumblr, while other times people form digital micro-communities on Facebook as if it is Reddit. In this context, we explore what our participants think of profiles and accounts and how much they value them.

#Profiles - Because surfing and entertainment takes precedence over social connection, sometimes users do not need to have real profiles to present to other users. Sometimes, a dummy profile is just enough to browse Facebook’s world of content; a pen-name account can be more safely used for social and political expression. While some users will have only one real profile, which (s)he might use for both social connection and “leisure reading” on Facebook, others might go to great lengths to create multiple profiles– one for social use and one for surfing and other purposes.

Using a real or different identity on Facebook is completely dependent on users’ preferences. The research team did not find any one defining factor to explain why some choose to be more anonymous than others. For example, people may:

• curate one profile only to build up a personal branding or a digital CV;
• create a pen name profile to read and write personal blogs under different names;
• use different profiles under their real name to connect with different social circles: game, work, family etc.;
• have multiple accounts to deal with multiple romantic partners; or
• not use their real identity simply for introversion or to avoid online harassment and protect privacy.

Other reasons why people choose not to use real names or photos on their profile include:

• People of very low internet literacy are not aware that real names should be used;
• Others are using fake names and they follow the trend; or
• An avatar name sounds much better or is what they always wanted to be called (i.e. creating a new virtual identity to fulfill a personal fantasy).

In many focus groups, participants proudly expressed how many accounts they had; it is considered normal to have more than one social media profile on the same platform. For most ordinary users, having a different identity online does not always imply malicious intent. However, it is important to note that participants did mention their experiences with and awareness of fake profiles with malicious intentions and unverifiable identities.

#Accounts - Many participants reported that a few years back, they did not know how to sign up for a Facebook account because it required Gmail. The majority of the participants have already abandoned their first ever Facebook account for any one of the three reasons: because they lost it; they do not like it anymore; or they worry that somebody else has access to it (i.e. those opened by mobile shops).

For young women users, it is most common for a new account to be opened because of a forgotten password; young men commonly opened new accounts just because they can. Users of both genders sometimes abandoned an account for personal reasons, for instance, following a break up with a romantic partner.

Those who lose access to their Facebook account (forgetting passwords and having no reset options) expressed their frustration about not being able to take down the account and its content. Women participants mentioned that, being unable to deactivate their account, they kept reporting their old account from a new one hoping that Facebook would take it down– often, with little success.

For quite a number of participants, Facebook accounts are dispensable. The less refined a person’s Facebook account is in terms of connections and a curated News Feed (either due to lack of skills or due to disinterest), the less worried they are about losing their account and opening a new one. Conversely, the more digitally savvy a person is, the more protective they are of their passwords and their account ownership. Among participants who fit the former category, many mentioned they rarely recall their password; once they log out, they will not be sure of how to log in again.

For some, changing to a new phone means creating a new Facebook account– simply for the lack of skills in logging back in to an existing account just out of disinterest in going through the process. Some users entrust their passwords to others around them (such as friends and family) simply because they believe others can keep it better than they do. This suggests that safekeeping digital profiles does not represent a significant concern for most people in their day-to-day lives.

However, this does not mean digital privacy is completely unconcerning. Participants worried that other people might be able to log in and look at their accounts; these concerns were most acute for those who feel they lack digital skills.

Facebook: can't live with it, can't live without it?

Without prompt, participants sometimes expressed their self-assessment of behaviour on social media as a developmental process, which they described as “maturity”. Many participants were able to reflect on how their behaviour had shifted as they used social media for longer periods. In the process, they also projected expectations about how others should also behave online, an expectation which resonated from their own developed behaviour. 

We did not ask explicit questions about what people think of hate-speech on social media, given how little time for trust-building we had in each focus group. Nevertheless, the participants discussed the issue with more openness than we anticipated and showed perspectives that we did not expect. With the exception of a few, participants did not mention hate-speech but referred to such contents as “ငြင်းဆို/ ngyinnso (disagreement)”, “ဒေါသထွက်/dawsahtwat (anger)” and “ရန်ဖြစ်/, raan hpy (fighting)”, all of which they regard as having a negative impact on their mood⁴. Intermittently⁵ barraged by such emotive expressions, participants mentioned their subconscious gradual detachment from the pseudo-reality constructed on Facebook, a form of detachment which they also partly associated to their ‘maturity on social media’. Participants also mentioned the frequent occurrence of “obvious hoaxes” and “ridiculous news”, which some choose to sarcastically engage while others ignore. As this content contradicted our participants’ perceived usefulness of access to information mentioned in the previous section, we will use the simple umbrella terms ‘negative content’ and ‘trash content’ in this section to refer to them.

#MaturityorFatigue? - “ရင့်ကျက်/ring  kyet (mature)” was a phrase and topic that appeared in many focus groups in reference to becoming less and less active in posting personal details. Participants noted that they have become less expressive of private matters or feelings than before as they have matured in their social media use.

Some explained this as behaviour change stemming from having gained better understanding about the online world. As their digital savvy increased, they felt ashamed of what they posted in the past. This change in awareness differs from digital literacy in that it describes and evaluates behaviour not skills. It also differs from ethics in that maturity sets self-realised behaviour change in a larger context and situates it in a developmental process. Maturity is neither literacy nor ethics but it seems to be related to both.

Participants also tend to see people who post everything as immature or “annoying”. For example, those in Taunggyi talked about how they have become overstimulated and gradually habituated to the same social media behaviours from their friends. Hpa-an participants expressed that they also find it strange when people post about trivial personal details, since other friends on their newsfeed are no longer posting in this way. Many users expect their Facebook friends to be more mature and self-editing, just as they themselves care less about getting attention on their posts in the form of “social obligatory likes”, reactions, and comments.

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[4] As such, when we use the word ‘hate-speech’ in this report, it is only our interpretation, not participants’ language.
[5] Some participants recounted certain period in the past, when hate-speech is more abundant than in other times, for example late 2017.

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I used to like selfie so much. I would take selfie all the time, even when I’m eating I would take selfie. Then I got tired with selfie. [...]

In the past, I would be interested in my friends’ posts about what they were doing or where they were. But if they keep posting about the same thing every time they go somewhere, for example saying things like “do I look good today?”, I feel jaded. [...]

If it’s the same thing again and again, I don’t want to look at them if possible. I like beautiful things, but if they don’t make sense to me or I cannot relate to it, I feel it just slows down my phone.

Peri-urban youth group (men), Taunggyi

ကျနော် ဟိုးအရင်တုန်းက selfie ဆွဲတာ ဝါသနာပါတာ။ ထမင်းစားနေရင်လည်း ထမင်းစားနေတဲ့ပုံ selfie ဆွဲလိုက်ရမှ။​ နောက်ပိုင်းကျတော့ တဖြည်းဖြည်းနဲ့ အီသွားသလို ထင်ပါတယ်။ [...]

အရင်တုန်းကဆိုရင် သူငယ်ချင်း ဘယ်ရောက်နေလည်း မသိဘူး။ ဒါပေမယ့် သူအမြဲတမ်း ဒီပုံကဒီပုံပဲ နောက်တစ်နေရာသွားလည်း “ဒီနေ့ချောလား၊​ အသည်းလေးတွေပေးပါဦး” ဒီလိုပဲ ဖြစ်နေမယ်ဆိုရင်တော့ မကြည့်ဖြစ်တော့ဘူး။ ငြီးငွေ့လာတယ်ပေါ့နော်။​ [...]

နေ့တိုင်းဒီအကြောင်းအရာတွေကြီးပဲ ထပ်ခါထပ်ခါ တင်နေတာဆိုတော့ ဖြစ်နိုင်မယ်ဆို မကြည့်ချင်တော့ဘူးပေါ့။ ချော်တာလှတာတော့ နှစ်သက်တယ်၊​ အကြောင်းတစ်ခုက အဓိပ္ပာယ်မရှိပဲ ကိုယ့်ဖုန်းထဲမှာ နှေးသွားတယ်လို့ပဲ ခံစားရတယ်။

This type of maturity may not be fully normative: while it is difficult to do a correlation of this phenomenon to different factors such as digital literacy, digital age, socio-economic background, exposure to certain contents, new platform features, or even the emergence of other applications, it appears that some mixture of factors does determine the degree to which users self-edit. While it may not be related to participants’ age, it is perhaps more to do with how long they have been using Facebook. Perhaps, it is also related to how users selectively or non-selective befriend others on social media, which determines the degree to which one is exposed to online-only behaviours of others, whom they may not know in real life, and therefore, making themselves more detached from behaviours to which they cannot relate. Thus, one focus group from urban Taunggyi with a slightly more tech savvy group of middle class participants, who selectively add friends on Facebook, answered that their engagement on social media contents has not seen any shift.

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I used to like [everything] on Facebook as I had a new phone. Also I was curious what would come up on my NewsFeed. But later these days, I feel jaded. I no longer give “likes”.

​52 years old broker (woman), peri-urban Taunggyi

အရင်တုန်းက like လုပ်တယ်။ ဖုန်းအသစ်ကိုင်ထားတော့ Facebook မှာ Like လုပ်တယ်။ ဘာတွေ တက်လာမလဲဆိုပြီးတော့ပေါ့။ အခုနောက်ပိုင်းကျတော့ ငြီးငွေ့လာတယ်။ မလုပ်ဖြစ်တော့ဘူး။

It may also be that this self-editing behaviour constitutes a type of identity projection, one which emphasises aloofness or independence from social expectations. For instance, many participants noted that the juxtaposition of online and offline personalities is jarring, with many trying to present a certain face to the world in order to gain attention or impress others. Such attention seeking behaviour was seen by participants as being too “အပေါ်ယံဆန် / a-po-yan-san (superficial)”. When participants were asked questions about the ethics of what people should or should not do on Facebook, they answered, among many other things, that posting too much about your every trivial detail is not ethical. As such, it may be that this behaviour is associated with materialism, consumerism, or boasting, which carries with it cultural and moral connotations for many in Myanmar. By being aloof or not sharing too many personal details, one ethically expresses perceived values of a good person on social media.

Whatever the cause, the shift toward “maturity” was present in every focus group discussion.

#Trash&Negativity - Given the prevalence of trash content, and how seemingly impossible it is to avoid it, some participants told us that they have become more indifferent towards emotive, negative, false, or misleading content. Whereas in the past, many would have written a response countering such content, now they just ignore it, without bothering to report or even hide it. If trash content is repeatedly coming from the same person, participants did say they would unfollow or unfriend the offender.

As people are more and more exposed, they are gradually developing immunity to online negativity. Many users also expressed a degree of ‘hate speech and fake news fatigue’, which also means that they no longer get absorbed into discussions and debates around such content but rather, developed their own ways of coping with it. The less curated and refined a social media account is, i.e. because the user adds random people as friends, or never fine-tune their News Feed, the more likely it is that users will be exposed to trash content. Such group of users would be more likely to say that they are too frustrated with using Facebook.

The more users are exposed to trash content, people seem to accept these as part of reality. Participants noted that, while they used to comment on trash content in the past as a means of letting other people know that those are problematic, now they realised that it was not going to make a difference, and that by doing so, their actions were inadvertently boosting such trash posts’ engagement and reach.

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Later these days, I no longer comment [on public places]. And I no longer pay attention. It’s like I was encouraging them. In the past, if they argued [with swearing words] at my comment once, I would respond with ten comments. But later on, I no longer argued back. Because this is causing a vicious circle. I just thought of the potential 10 people who will swear back at my comment. [...] I just ignored and thought even if I don’t argue/swear, other people will do it anyway.

​Peri-urban youth group (men), Yangon

အခုနောက်ပိုင်း ဘာကိုမှ​ comment မပေးတော့တာ။ အာရုံလဲ မစိုက်တော့ဘူး။ သူတို့ကို မြှောက်ပေးသလို ဖြစ်နေတယ်။ အရင်တုန်းက သူတို့ တစ်ခွန်းဆဲရင် ကျနော် ဆယ်ခွန်း ပြန်ဆဲဖြစ်တယ်။ နောက်ပိုင်းကျရင် မဆဲတော့ပါဘူး။ ဘာလို့လဲဆိုတော့ အဲ့ဒီ သံသရာကြီးပဲလည်နေတယ်။ သူ့ကိုဆဲရင် ကျနော့်ကို ပြန်ဆဲ့မယ့် လူဆယ်ယောက်ကို ကြည့်ပြီး မဆဲတော့ဘူး။ [...] ငါမဆဲလည်း သူများတွေ ဆဲမှာပဲ ဆိုပြီး ပစ်ထားလိုက်တယ်။

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Later these days, there are tons of fake pages [on Facebook]. I no longer gave attention to them [no longer countered them]. Because as long as they receive comments, they will keep going. So they would only stop if we neglect them. Reporting these pages to Facebook does not make any difference either.

​Peri-urban youth group (men), Yangon

အခုနောက်ပိုင်းကျတော့ Fake page တွေ များလာတယ်။ အခု သူတို့ကို attention မပေးတော့ဘူး။ သူတိုဆီမှာ comment တွေ ဆက်ရနေမျှ သူတို့ ဆက်လုပ်နေမှာပဲလေ။ ကျနော်တို့က သူတို့ကို neglect လုပ်ထားမှ သူတို့ ရပ်သွားမှာလေ။ Report ထုလည်း ဘာမှ မထူးခြားတာဆိုတော့။

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I used to like friends’ posts on Facebook. But now I only give likes to posts that I really like. I no longer feel obliged to give like, but only when I actually like it. [...] When I was using Facebook in the past, there were no conflicts. It was simple without Fake News. We just upload photos. It become worse in the past 3-4 years. Fake pages and fake accounts have increased. And also people I knew changed their opinions and their stance [on political views]. So I don’t want to endorse them [by liking their posts]. They could be wrong. In the past, I could just neglect this by recognizing that it was just their feelings. But these days, if I give like, I will be supporting their view. I had to practice myself from not being socially obliged.

50 years old journalist (Woman), Taunggyi

Facebook မှာ like ပေးတာကြတော့ အရင်ကဆိုရင် သူငယ်ချင်းတွေ တင်လာတာ ပေးဖြစ်တယ်။ အခုကျတော့ ကိုယ်တကယ်ကြိုက်မှ ပေးတယ်။ အားနာတာ မဖြစ်တော့ဘူးပေါ့။ ငါတကယ် ကြိုက်မှ ပေးမယ်ပေါ့။ [...] အရင်က social media သုံးတဲ့ ချိန်မှာ conflict မရှိဘူး။ Fake news မရှိတော့ simple ဖြစ်တယ်ပေါ့။ အချင်းချင်း ပုံလေးတွေပဲ တင်တယ်။ အခုနောက်ပိုင်း သုံးလေးနှစ်အတွင်းမှာ ဆိုးဝါးလာတယ်။ Fake page တွေ Fake account တွေ များလာတယ်။ နောက်ပြီး ကိုယ်နဲ့သိတဲ့ သူတွေရဲ့ အမြင်တွေကလည်း ပြောင်းလဲလာတယ်။ ရပ်တည်ချက်တွေကအစ ပြောင်းလဲလာတယ်။ အားပေးလိုက်တာမျိုး မဖြစ်စေချင်ဘူး။ သူမှားနေတာလည်း ဖြစ်နိုင်တယ်လေ။ ဒါကြောင့် အရင်ကဆိုရင်တော့ ဒါသူတို့ စိတ်ခံစားချက်ပဲဆိုပြီး neglect လုပ်ထားလို့ ရတယ်လေ။ ဒါပေမဲ့ like ပေးလိုက်ရင် အားပေးသလိုဖြစ်မှာဆိုလို့ မပေးတော့ဘူး။ အားမနာတတ်အောင် လေ့ကျင့်ထားရတယ်။

Despite being aware of such abundant negativity, participants still found themselves unable to give up using the social platform. As such, participants were frustrated by the online experience, and many worked to detach themselves, at least to some extent, from the pseudo-reality of the platform. After all, participants seemed to blame the negative consequences of the internet [Facebook] on individual actors, rather than on the platform itself. In particular, participants felt that a person’s critical thinking ability and self control were central to their experience of the internet– for good or for ill.

When asked whether they think the internet has a net positive or negative impact on society, rather than giving a definite answer, most participants had a similar comment that “a person who cannot use the platform for good will have negative effects but that if you make good use of the internet and technology, it will be beneficial for you.”

Facebook gives us access to information at our fingertips; how much of it do we trust?

Phandeeyar engages regularly in activities designed to build digital literacy and fight against disinformation on social media. As such, it is critical for us to understand the way people consume information through the internet on their mobile phones. Sometimes, we presume in our work that ordinary users do not verify information enough or that a lack of digital skills or mobile savvy is the direct result of the lack of information literacy. Through this research we put our assumptions to test in order to better understand how people receive and perceive the barrage of information they see everyday on Facebook.

#FacebookLeisure - Facebook “reading/watching”, “learning”, or “collecting knowledge” (in participants’ terms) is a stronger pull to Facebook than social networking, be it for learning or entertainment. Facebook was most participants’ preferred place for leisure reading/watching, due in large part to the availability of Myanmar content that participants, both youth and adults, referred to as “knowledge” or “something to learn”. Popular reading topics included philosophy, inspiration, quotes, comedy, other people’s blogs, religious information, and celebrity news. Quality of content is still the most important aspect of a Facebook post: the source (page/profile) and number of likes matter less than the actual content.

When it comes to active versus passive newsfeed scrolling, it is difficult to reach a conclusive explanation of general habits. Participants demonstrated different reading behaviours based on their interest and level of skill. For example, some participants who curate their own newsfeed, by searching for new content or unfollowing uninterested pages/people, may have developed skills for content evaluation. Nevertheless, it is not possible to assume that users who do not actively curate their newsfeed are incapable of discerning fake content: sometimes they knowingly look at such fake content just for their amusement.

#Facebook&News - Though participants cited Facebook as an important platform, or sometimes even as the only source of news updates, participants knew and mentioned, even without prompts, that what they see on Facebook cannot be trusted completely uncritically. The level of scepticism expressed varied depending on the participants, regardless of their background or gender

Participants in this study also claimed to obtain their news updates from local news groups or groups made up of specific types of communities (i.e. religious, civil society, etc.). Participant claimed that sometimes they were frustrated when different news pages upload versions of the same news which featured inconsistencies among them, noting that this made them confused about what is to trust. As a result, many participants felt that news posted by trusted community members was more reliable than news posted to pages ostensibly dedicated to keeping people in the know.

Though participants recognise that they cannot blindly trust online news, many were unable to identify verification methods. Some participants commented that their evaluation methods were largely dependent on the content, such as content analysis or  critical analysis, rather than verification cues method, such as checking the sources (page/account), dates, authors, or references– options many were not aware of. Many participants also said that the most common way of confirming the validity of a content is to read the comments and see what people are already saying; as such, many users appear to limit their critical reflection on content validity to the information presented by other users.

It is hard to gauge whether users have active or passive news consumption habits on Facebook. It is even difficult to define who’s a news reader and who’s not, when information is pushed in to our daily surfing, rather than by choice Perhaps it is an area that needs additional attention: an ethnographic study of news reading behaviour on mobile phone could be hugely informative.

​While most participants said that they received their news updates primarily from Facebook, others expressed their frustration with not having other choice but to source information from  Facebook, and in the process, they risk being exposed to low-quality or misleading news.

Conclusions - We all agree that Facebook is an important digital platform in Myanmar, and that its impact extends to offline social dynamics. However, “Facebook is the internet of Myanmar” over simplifies complex social dynamics, and ignores the subtle ways people make meaning out of digital world. Facebook is the internet for many in that its function goes beyond virtual socialization: it is the key to accessing information, for many, seemingly the ONLY way.

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In the past, not everyone can use [Facebook]. We had less access to knowledge. Our views were not very open [about the world]. Only a small section of the people used it and we had to use it in internet cafes. Now these days it’s so easy to use with phones and our views are now more broad. Everybody can access. Sim cards can be easily bought.

24 years old user (woman), Yangon

အရင်တုန်းက သိပ်ပြီးမသုံးကြဘူး။ [...] သိပ်ပြီး ဗဟုသုတ မရှိကြဘူး။ အမြင်မကျယ်သွားဘူး။ လူနည်းစုပဲ သုံးကြတယ်။ အင်တာနက်ဆိုင်တွေမှာပဲ သုံးရတယ်။ အခုနောက်ပိုင်းက ဖုန်းတွေနဲ့ အလွယ်တကူ သုံးလို့ရသောကြောင့် အမြင်ကျယ်သွားပြီ။ လူတိုင်းသုံးလာနိုင်ပြီ။ ဖုန်းကဒ်က အလွယ်တကူရနေပြီ။

There is clearly a trend that people are gradually getting frustrated and habituated to– accepting as part of the reality– the negativity disagreement on Facebook. But can we really give up Facebook or figure out a way to avoid seeing such content on our Newsfeed? As one Muslim participant from Yangon put it, “Facebook is like the world to me,” and yet she understood Facebook was doing more harm than good for her community. Meanwhile many others tried to explain this situation as the causality of individuals’ behaviours rather than the platform’s existence: i.e. if you use it for your own good, then it is a good thing and vice versa. For others, it is the platform’s unrestrictive nature that ‘anyone’ could join to use and abuse and that results in exposure to a dangerous side of the world, one they may not otherwise encounter in their offline social bubble.

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Right now there’s more bad effects than good benefits. In the past only a small portion of people use it. But now as everybody can use it with their phones, it has more negative effects. It’s frustrating. As literally anyone is there, some people are just there more to annoy other people. It’s so easy if someone wants to attack or harass you with so many accounts, you can just do it by opening accounts with phone numbers. The fact that it is easier to open accounts could give more negative consequences.

39 years old shop owner (man), Yangon

လက်ရှိအခြေနေမှာဆို ဆိုးကျိုးများတယ်။ အရင်ကဆို လူအနည်းစုပဲ သုံးတယ်။ အခုကတော့ ဖုန်းတွေနဲ့ လူတိုင်းသုံးတော့ ဆိုးကျိုးပိုများလာတယ်။ စိတ်ရှုပ်လာစေတယ်။ လူတိုင်း သုံးနိုင်တော့ တချို့ကတော့ စိတ်အနောက်ယှက်ပေးဖို့ သုံးလာတာများတယ်။ Account တွေ အများကြီးသုံးပြီး တိုက်ခိုက်ချင်တယ် ဆိုရင်တောင် ဖုန်းနံပါတ်တွေနဲ့ ဖွင့်ပြီး တိုက်ခိုက်တယ်။ အလွယ်တကူဖွင့်လို့ရနေတော့ ဆိုးကျိုးများတယ်။

Facebook is also the most popular blogging platform for self-expression, public sphere and surfing in such contents. We also learnt that many users in Myanmar disregard Facebook’s requirement for true-identity profile. Facebook serves many functions, more than merely connecting with friends and family, and therefore self-identification is not necessary. As such, non-real identity accounts can be either simply ordinary or malicious. For this open and equal access nature, this is when the institution is no longer capable of doing the quality evaluation of all the information it hosts on its platform, it is up to users to become active evaluator of information they are exposed to everyday.

There is no such answer is Facebook net good or bad for Myanmar. We conclude this section with a table juxtaposing positive and negative aspects of the impact Facebook in Myanmar as perceived by our participants.

BAD	GOOD
Fake accounts (malicious accounts)	Good connection with friends over distance.
Hate-speech. Misleading, attacking or insulting one’s religion.	Opportunity to better represent one’s region as well as learn about others. Attract more interest and visit from people across the country to one’s region.
More bad news in general on Facebook.	Finding sources of inspiration.
Misinformation and disinformation. Unethical media. Media tabloid / sensationalism. High amount of trash posts (spam) online.	Access to information and “knowledge”. Ability to search information (in Myanmar or local language)
Perception that online public sphere negatively impacts politics.	Perception that online public sphere negatively impacts politics. Better civil engagement with the Government (said by civil society)
Perception that time spent using social media is time wasted.	Helps business and professional life.
Opinionating too much about public topics and figures without actually knowing or reading the details (in comments). Too much opinions about celebrities’ lifestyle or celebrity shaming.	Availability of leisure reading, entertainment, self-learning and DIY.

 

Safe Internet

Digital Skills: Where should you learn it or should you bother?

Phandeeyar have struggled over the years to understand how people develop their digital skills– an insight which would enable better programme design. As such, we asked users to explain how they learned their digital skills, but in the process, we came to discern how much they felt digital skills were important to them. We also discussed how participants felt about having (or not having) password locks on their phones. Participants saw privacy not in the western notion of individual data but understood it instead as the protection of one’s own secrets within social groups.

#DigitalSkills - None of the research participants had ever received proper digital skills training. The mobile shops that help users to open accounts do not teach them how to use their phones, nor do users return to these shops to ask specific questions. Every participant we asked either learned their skills from their friends or family members; most of their skills were acquired by self-directed learning or through trial and error.

Not all participants believed digital skills were particularly important. The same users who see profiles as disposable, sometimes do not bother to learn phone/account settings out of disinterest. These users were more likely to be among older participants. The lack of digital skills can also relate to the lack of concern in protecting current accounts, i.e. opening a new account would be a lot less work and worry. This has nothing to do with digital literacy or access, but rather, appears dependent on a person’s own regard or interest.

There seemed to be general consensus that Myanmar language on phone and Facebook settings and interface is poor quality in terms of intelligibility. Participants claimed that they are now very accustomed to seeing English words on their devices, and that they understand these words better than their Myanmar counterparts which sometimes have a different meaning to the English word they displace.. In fact, several participants remarked that it is actually annoying or “lame” to use devices in Myanmar language. In part, this is also due to the issue of Zawgyi and Unicode font rendering on android mobile systems (e.g. system font is in Zawgyi and system setting language is written in Unicode), which makes words appear broken and reinforces the disbelief about workability of Myanmar language settings.

#SecuritySettings - Screen lock passwords were discussed as a matter of privacy in a phone sharing context, rather than as a means of protecting one’s data— i.e. privacy to more immediate persons, such as family or friends, rather than to thieves.

There appears to be a roughly equal divide between people who think they should or should not use a phone lock, pin-code, or pattern. Many users have not thought about the risks, or do not know how to create a password, but these are not the only reasons. Even when users recognise the danger to personal data if a phone is lost or stolen, many still opt to keep their phone open because:

• They share their phone with other family members;
• Others might think that a password means they have low transparency with other family members or have things to hide;
  
• They find signing into phone each time is an unnecessary process.

In fact, not being aware of the 'emergency call' function and how to make use of it, participants also stressed the downside of using in the context of emergency. They would rather prefer that their phone be available to use in events of accident or medical emergency by other people, which many view as a more important thing than protecting privacy.

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No, I don’t use password on my phone. It’s annoying. I think even if I have passwords, they will still get my photos and data [if stolen]. So it doesn’t make a difference

​21 years old factory worker (woman), Hlaing Thar Yar

ဖုန်းမှာ password မခံထားဘူး။ Password ထားတာ ရှုပ်လို့။ ညီမအထင်ကတော့ password ထားလည်း memory strick ယူလိုက်ရင် ကိုယ့်ရဲ့ photo တွေ data တွေ ရသွားမှာပဲ ဘာမှ မထူးလို့ မထားတာ။

Only a few participants– particularly those with a civil society background, or with higher digital literacy skills– emphasised that people should use a password lock on their phones to protect their personal data.

A significant proportion of participants have weak passwords and safeguarding practices for their social accounts. For example, some users recorded their passwords; entrusted other people to remember their passwords; or kept guessable passwords such as their name or birthday. Participants with low digital literacy skills, who do not have email accounts and do not know how to reset a password, are very often still using passwords that their friends, family members, or phone shops helped set up. Some users in this same group have already forgotten their password, though still logged in, and they would lose their current account once logged out.

Factors influencing the level of digital skills
Gender, age, social status (education, profession, wealth) and exposure are the main factors, which seem to influence digital competency (knowledge, skill, attitude and practice). Based on our research, one’s level of digital skill seems to mainly depend on:

• age (older <———> younger)
  
• gender (female <———> male)
  
• exposure to IT and electronic products (varying based on wealth status, geolocation, values and attitudes in family, and peer influence, etc.)
• education, work and income level (low education / unskilled labourers <———> skilled blue and white collar employees/professionals and/or business operators)
• personal interest (less interested in technology <———> highly interested in technology)

People in the left-hand-side of the spectrum would have relatively very less knowledge in managing their mobile phones.

In addition, individuals keep family members and friends as go-to resource persons for questions or solutions. Possible  persons/service who provide skills include:

1. Peers (relatively more tech savvy individuals; those who have free and/or 24/7 access to WiFi or surf the internet a lot),
2. Mobile phone shops (but they seem to have varying levels of capacity but most of them seem to have been not properly trained).

Most common ways of learning include:

• self-learning by trial and error;
• asking family members (younger family members are better with digital skills), or involving in social digital activity with peers:
• Sitting down and discussing mobile phones activities together in a social group, for example sharing of applications or files through apps such as Zapya.

Facebook or Fakebook: should we only post when we are happy?

For our participants, being ethical is partly synonymous with being considerate. We asked participants to help us understand what ethical behaviour looks like in practice, according to their definition. We also asked participants what they would rather not see on social media. In particular, participants called out online shaming (of mostly celebrities).

#DigitalSocialSphere - It seemed that participants are becoming increasingly aware that their actions leave digital footprints others can see. Within the ethical question, some participants evaluate posting, reacting and commenting in terms of the benefits for others and building a good image of themselves. For example, a few participants discussed that they would only post positive things or reflections of themselves so as not to bring their negativity online to others. Therefore, quite a number of participants seem to agree that very critical opinions, emotive content, or things that make others sad or upset should not be posted. This is also related to posting shallow personal updates, as discussed in the maturity section above. Considered partly as an issue of ethical social behaviour, participants said that they find repeated occurrence of shallow or too personal posts in their newsfeed annoying, and therefore, doing so would be inconsiderate of others.

Posting of “inconsiderate” items is not limited to personal things. It includes any online content that would potentially upset others. One illustrative example that participants said they commonly found annoying are the prank videos that trick a person to watch and unexpectedly disturbing or pornographic image appears in the middle of the video. Another example is a kind of post that, when clicked see more, occupied the mobile screen with characters and took too long to scroll to the end.

More importantly, there are a few things that participants strongly think should not be part of social media. Many of them, are things that participants found frustrating– in part because they felt overexposed to them:

• Accidents photos [gore or graphic violence], which some participants found it hard to avoid and deemed unnecessary to be updated with every crime events or accidents. They mentioned that seeing such posts ruin their mood offline;
• Nudity and pornography was the second most mentioned unethical sharing in online space.
• Participants also expressed their frustration of the abundance of sensationalism, online shaming, and cyberbullying of celebrity or online personalities, saying that people are too opinionated on others’ lifestyle.
• Participants think people should not write insults on religion or expressions loaded with vulgar, aggressive, or harsh words.

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If something bad were to happen outside, I’m afraid it could automatically be on Facebook. [We] lost freedom [privacy] [outside]. I think Facebook is useful because we get news updates right away. For good and bad. But sometimes, if I come across and read news like car accidents [on Facebook] at night, I feel really bad even if it’s not related to me. In those kinds of nights, I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid.

32 years old nursery teacher (woman), Yangon

ပြသာနာတစ်ခုခုဖြစ်ရင် Facebook ပေါ်ရောက်သွားမလား။ ကြောက်နေရတယ်။ လွှတ်လပ်မှုတွေ ပျောက်ဆုံးသွားတယ်။ နောက်တခုက သတင်းတွေကို အချိန်နဲ့ တစ်ပြေးညီ သိနေရတော့ အကျိုးရှိတယ်လို့ ထင်တယ်။ အကောင်းအဆိုးပေါ့။ တစ်ခါတစ်လေကြတော့ရင်လည်း ကားတိုက်ပြီးသေတဲ့ သတင်းတွေ ညဘက်လိုမျိုး ကိုယ်ဖတ်မိရင် ကိုယ်နဲတော့မဆိုင်ဘူး။ ဒါပေမဲ့ စိတ်မကောင်းဘူး။ အဲလို ညမျိုး အိပ်မပျော်ဘူး ကြောက်တယ်ပေါ့။

#NegativePerception - Participants often mentioned that they had concerns about the side effects of consuming digital technology, particularly from the perspective of offline self-control. Further, mobile addiction, they felt, may cause damage to the eyes and waste time and money. While younger people expressed these concerns about themselves, in Kalay, adults (employees at a local clinic) talked about how using mobile phones at work is frowned upon by their employer and that it is a form of slacking. The feeling of shame around “excessive” or non-productive internet use was especially acute in the presence of parents, seniors, or employers. Participants from Kalay even mentioned that their parents think mobile phone “addiction” is making them lazy.

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[Our employers] won’t let us play video games. At work, everyone is forbidden from using phones. At first, we played mobile games a lot, and we got scolded a lot, so we stopped playing.

It’s bad for habit and morality. For example, when a kid is playing mobile phone, he/she doesn’t want to help if [parents] ask them to help. They become grumpy if they have to get up. I’m the same while I’m using mobile. If someone orders me to do something, I could get frustrated. Even for us, we don’t get up immediately becuase of [using] phone, even when our employer asks [us to do] something. It’s especially inconvenient if work pops up while I’m watching movies.

42 years old Clinic Security Guard (man), Kalay

Game မကစားခိုင်းဘူးလေ။ အကုန်လုံးကို အလုပ်ထဲမှာ ဖုန်းမသုံးခိုင်းဘူး။ ပထမက Game ဆော့တာ ခနခန အဆူခံရလို့ မဆော့ကြတော့ဘူး။

အကျင့်စာရိတ္တပျက်တယ်။ ဥပမာ ကလေးတစ်ယောက်က ဖုန်းဆော့နေတဲ့အချိန် တစ်ခုခုခိုင်းကြည့်။ မလုပ်ချင်ဘူး။ လုပ်ရင်တောင် ဆောင့်ဆောင့်အောင့်အောင့်နဲ့သွားတာ။ ကိုယ်ဖုန်းသုံးနေလည်း အဲ့လိုပဲပေါ့။ တစ်ယောက်ယောက်က လာခိုင်းရင် စိတ်က သိကအောင့်ဖြစ်တယ်။ ကျွန်တော်တို့ဆိုလည်း ဖုန်းကြောင့်နဲ့ ချက်ချင်း မထတာတွေ ရှိတယ် အလုပ်ရှင်က ခိုင်းရင်တောင်။ ဇာတ်လမ်းကြည့်နေတဲ့အချိန် အလုပ်ပေါ်လာရင်တော့ အဆင်မပြေတော့ဘူး။

Conclusions - Beyond the civil society’s understanding of hate-speech, where hate-speech is sometimes politicized within the framework of freedom of speech, participants simply pointed out their desire for more positive and less negative content. In particular, they want to see less content that annoys them on daily scale. However, on a more serious note, it points to the possibility that persistence of certain types of emotive content will have negative psychological impact on users in the long term. In light of this understanding, when we discuss community standards for building safer and healthier online space, civil society should rethink the way they approach hate-speech to include the perspective of psychological well-being.

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There were times I was too scared of using Facebook. The time I was most afraid of going online [Facebook] was when there were religious conflicts. Although I wanted to get updates on the news of what was going on, I got distracted by the cursing among one another. In those days, I was scared to open Facebook. Those were the days of being too scared of using Facebook.

25 years old civil society leader (woman), Yangon

အခုကျတော့ Facebook သုံးရမှာ ကြောက်သွားတဲ့ အချိန်တွေ ရှိတယ်။ Facebook သုံးရမှာ အကြောက်ဆုံးက ဘာသာရေး ပဋိပက္ခဖြစ်တဲ့ အချိန် လိုင်းသုံးရမှာ အကြောက်ဆုံး ဖြစ်ခဲ့တယ်။ တစ်ဦးနဲ့တစ်ဦး အကြိတ်အနယ် ဆဲနေတာ ပြောနေတာ မြင်ရတော့ သတင်းတွေကို အချိန်နဲ့ သိချင်သော်လည်း အဲ့စိတ်က အနောက်ရောက်သွားတယ်။ အဲ့လိုနေ့တွေဆိုရင် Facebook မဖွင့်ရဲတော့ဘူး။ သုံးရမှာ ကြောက်တဲ့ရက်ဆို အဲလိုနေ့မျိုး ဖြစ်ခဲ့ဖူးတယ်။

Lack of digital skills is also not necessarily the result of lack of access. Participants had varying attitude when it comes to learning digital skills. A wider scale sensitization of why digital skills are important and how they will benefit users in everyday settings should be included in long term intervention plans.

 

Mobile & Women

In our efforts to bridge the digital divide, it is important we understand that women have different experiences online– experiences that sometimes hinder them from utilising the full potential of digital technology. According to Facebook Audience Insights, approximately 65 percent of Facebook accounts in Myanmar belong to men, and only 35 to women. In many peri-urban and rural areas, digital skills are still seen as ‘male skills’. The research team commonly heard women saying they would ask their male counterparts to help with settings or passwords on their phones; men rarely asked women for help. Women were more likely to say they entrust their passwords to their other female friends or siblings.

When it comes to negative view of the social media, women are traditionally more likely to be associated more with negative effects of the digital technology. For example, women from families with lower socio-economic standing sometimes need permission from parents to use smart phones and social media because social media is seen as corrupting girls into bad habits, which is less the case for boys. This sometimes results in women hiding their real identity on Facebook, in an effort to avoid their use being discovered by family. This behaviour was especially common in peri-urban community FGDs, where all participants mentioned Facebook as a method of courting. Women using Facebook were seen as “looking for a husband”, and this made younger women participants embarrassed to admit when and how they used it–  particularly when their older family members were present.

Is digital harassment the new wolf whistle?

#OnlineHarassment is the biggest barrier that prevents women from fully navigating digital space. Woman users on Facebook sometimes use an avatar rather than their real name or photo, to avoid harassment or abuse– particularly, abuse features a digital manipulation of their pictures. Some women showed frustration that they did not know how to use settings to prevent this harassment.

When it comes to photo abuse, the major concern is the impersonation on Facebook, compounded by their feeling of helplessness in not knowing reporting or other risk-mitigating settings. The primary means of coping with targeted harassment is to abandon old Facebook accounts or to avoid uploading real photos.

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I used to use Facebook whole day in the past. I’ve also experienced my account being hacked. There were also accounts that were using my photos [opened by other people]. There were also accounts with a different name, which were using my photos. These kinds of things really frustrated me. My friends came and asked me: “How many accounts do you have?”. Then I said, “Those were not mine”. And they showed me accounts with my photos. Was it also me? That was very frustrating. I always had to explain [to them] that those were not mine. It really hurt my image outside. Later on, I went and messaged those accounts. I got really worried and reported them. I kept reporting the last account. Still not taken down.

22 years old college student (woman), Taunggyi

အရင်ကဆို ကျွန်မ Facebook ကို တစ်နေကုန် ထိုင်သုံးတယ်ပေါ့။ ဟက်ခံရတာလည်း ရှိတယ်။ ကျွန်မ ပုံသုံးပြီး ဖွင့်ထားတဲ့ account တွေလည်း ရှိတယ်ပေါ့။ နောက်ကျွန်မပုံနဲ့ တခြားနာမည်နဲ့ သုံးတာလည်းရှိတယ်။ အဲလိုမျိုး အရမ်းစိတ်ညစ်တယ်။ ကျွန်မ သူငယ်ချင်းတွေက မေးလာတယ် နင် account ဘယ်နစ်ခုတောင် သုံးတာလဲပေါ့။ ကျွန်မ မဟုတ်ဘူးလို့။ နောက်ပြီး ကျွန်မ ပုံနဲ့ account ဝင်လာတယ်။ ဒါနင်ပဲလားပေါ့။ အဲလိုမျိုးဆို အရမ်း စိတ်ညစ်တယ်။ အဲလိုမျိုးတွေ လိုက်ပြောပြနေရတာ ပြင်ပကို အရမ်း ထိခိုက်တယ်။ နောက်ပိုင်း ကျွန်မ သူတိုနဲ့ စကားသွားပြောတယ်။ အရမ်း စိုးရိမ်တယ်။ Report ထုတယ်။ နောက်ဆုံးသူ သုံးထားတဲ့ account ကို report ထုတယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့ မကျဘူး။

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It was my old account. That girl was from Taunggyi, from a hair salon. I never met her outside. She logged in to my account. I didn’t know how she got in. [My account] got hacked. She asked my home [parents] two hundred thousand kyats. My home thought she was me and sent one hundred thousand. When my friend sent me a message on the Messenger [of that account] to ask me when I was coming back, [the hacker] replied with an obscene photo. Then, my friend realized that it was not me. So we asked [help from] people from the office and reported that account. We had to delete that account in Yangon when my friend went to Yangon.

18 years old college student (woman), Taunggyi

Another common form of harassment is repeated calling or messaging over the phone, when  numbers have been taken from social media account or traded/shared by men among themselves. If women lack digital skills for coping, for instance, by blocking numbers, women are deterred from fully expressing themselves online.

အရင် account ပေါ့။ ဒီတောင်ကြီးကပဲ။ ဆံပင်ညပ်ဆိုင်က ကောင်မလေးပဲ။ ကျွန်မနဲ့လည်း တစ်ခါမှ မခင်ဘူး။ သူ ကျွန်မ account ကို ဝင်လာတယ်။ သူ ဘယ်လိုဝင်လဲတော့ မသိဘူး။ အဟက်ခံရတယ်။ အိမ်ကို သူပိုက်ဆံ ၂ သိန်း တောင်းတယ်။ အိမ်က လူထင်တာ ကိုယ်က ပိုက်ဆံတောင်းတယ်ထင်တာ တစ်သိန်း လွှဲလိုက်တယ် အိမ်က။ သူငယ်ချင်းက messenger ကို စာပို့တယ် ကျွန်မ ဘယ်အချိန် ပြန်လာမလဲပေါ့။ အဲဒါသူက မကောင်းတဲ့ပုံ ပို့လိုက်တယ်။ အဲဒါနဲ့ သူငယ်ချင်းက ဒါငါ့သူငယ်ချင်း မဟုတ်တော့ဘူးပေါ့။ အဲဒါ့နဲ့ ရုံးက လူတွေကို ပြောပြပြီး report ထုခိုင်းခဲ့တယ်။ အဲ့အချိန်တုန်းကတော့ အဲ account ကို သူငယ်ချင်းက ရန်ကုန်ဆင်းတော့ ရန်ကုန်မှာပဲ ဖျက်ရတယ်။

Conclusions - It is very important to note that women do also face many other forms of harassment in their digital everyday life, which may not have surfaced during the discussions due to privacy, trust, and group pressure. Furthermore, harassment was not intended to be a major focus of this study. Therefore, a further exploration of the experiences of women vis-a-vis online harassment in their everyday life in Myanmar would be hugely beneficial.

 

Conclusion

This is the first time that Phandeeyar has ventured out of its usual programme scope, i.e. to actually comprehend the context in which we operate. As a non-research institution, our capacity for social study is limited. Better understanding of the users and digital landscape, not just using numbers, but also social/anthropological insight, gives us a better understanding of the complex relationship users have with digital technology and enables more appropriate and effective innovation in both programming and support to communities. Furthermore, we present the findings to the public, donors, and other organizations so that they may utilize these insights in their interventions to better benefit internet users for greater social good in Myanmar. Through this research we understand that there are barriers for people to make use of the full potential of the internet and that certain groups are at more risk than the others. We also learned that Myanmar communities develop their own ways of coping with negativity online, despite a lack of formal trainings and programme support. We hope that these insights will allow us to challenge our previously held assumptions about the internet in Myanmar.

Although we acknowledge some of the insights presented in this report would benefit from further study, we believe it is important to recognize the issues raised by our participants. In doing so, we hope to spark curiosity for deeper research. There are certain areas we came across during the research that are out of our boundary of expertise, such as behaviours of news consumption on mobile phones, forms of harassment and their coping mechanism, and the various physiological impacts of negative online content on users– all of which would benefit from expert attention. Given the speed with which digital communities, their cultures, and their behaviours evolve, there is definite need for ongoing learning. Most importantly, these research made clear to Phandeeyar the importance of research-based programme design, for both immediate interventions and longer-term systemic measures envisioned to contribute to building a better and safer internet in Myanmar.

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