Protesters' social media usage patterns
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Last updated
Last updated
While the Tatmadaw’s propaganda moves can largely be understood as trying to apply a familiar playbook that has served them well in the past, the current protest movement is anything but a harkening back to a familiar past.
Within the last 5-10 years, Myanmar has experienced a telecommunications boom where the majority of the population has gone from never having been online to being able to use affordable smartphones with mobile internet connections with very few restrictions on what they were able to access online. Facebook usage soared, and in time other social networks such as TikTok and Instagram have also gained large user bases. Starting in 2012, this has also been paired with the relaxation of strict censorship laws and the opening up of independent media in the country. Suddenly, a new generation came of age in an environment where they could be connected to everyone else in the country, say what they wanted without the overwhelming fear that burdened many generations before them, and be exposed to ideas from all over the world.
For Myanmar’s Generation Z (usually defined as the generation born between 1995 and 2010), ideas that underpin social mores, business, entertainment, education and intimacy, were all markedly different from even the Millennial generation who only experienced the online connectivity and freedoms after they were well into their adulthood. Whereas Millennials and the generations that came before them were socially indoctrinated into very traditional notions around gender roles, rigid social hierarchies, ideas about race and religion and a fear of disagreeing with the opinion of someone of a higher social position than their own, Myanmar’s Gen Z have had a parallel world online where, ever since they entered their adolescent years, none of these rules applied.
Figure 46: Gen Z protesting with creative and funny slogans. (Source: BBC News Burmese)
Gen Z youth had been used to taking part in decentralised movements which are the norm in online spaces. For them, taking orders from a hierarchical chain of command was antithetical to their ethos and normal ways of doing things. Thus, a protest movement led by Gen Z was bound to be decentralised and organic.
The older generations of activists are also contributing with their hard-learned lessons from their past experience with the military. They know that the military’s strategy is going to be to target the leaders of the movement to throw it into disarray. In addition, the military, being an extremely hierarchical institution, would find it very difficult to understand non-hierarchical forms of organisation, and would therefore default to hunting down the leaders of the protests as a tactic. 88 Generation activist leader Min Ko Naing was well aware that, to succeed, this new movement had to be decentralised in order to be resilient in the face of the hostile adversary who would try to target whoever they perceived to be leaders of the movement.
On 5 February, he posted the poem below on his Facebook page. It is now being widely cited by protesters to remind each other that in this revolution, everyone is a leader, and no one is a leader.
“Despite removing the train head, All the coaches have their own heads, Let’s keep moving towards our destination.”
Figure 47: A poem by 88 Generation activist Min Ko Naing, which encourages the leaderless anti-coup movements. (Source: Min Ko Naing)
By mid-February, the 2021 protesters had poured out into the streets in their thousands in dozens of towns and cities across Myanmar. Before the violent crackdowns with live ammunition from the military and police began in the later weeks of February, the protests were marked by the sheer diversity of people who were represented. The protesters came up with many creative and amusing ways of showing their dissent, while at the same time expressing very progressive ideas about gender, sexuality and even expressing solidarity with the plight of the Rohingya – in stark contrast to the recent past, where the public opinion was mostly derogatory and prejudiced against them.
Figure 48: A viral picture of a couple dressed up wedding clothes during anti-coup protests in February. (Source: DVB TV News)
In the past decade, civil society groups and activists in Myanmar have used social media and the internet to amplify the reach of their campaigns and build solidarity across the country as well as with international activists. Hence, famous Myanmar activists such as Thinzar Shunlei Yi and Wai Wai Nu were already very much at home as activists who were also digital natives.
In addition to those who were already engaged in activism before the coup, a new wave of online activists who leveraged their online clout to pivot from posting about topics that are mostly about entertainment to posting entirely about anti-coup resistance topics has emerged. This is especially notable on Instagram, where accounts such as fullbellies_forlife, which posted about food, and ootdmyanmar (Outfit of the Day Myanmar), which posted about fashion, completely pivoted after the coup to posting protest slogans and providing crowdsourced news updates about the resistance and crackdowns through daily Instagram story updates.
Figure 49: Lifestyle Instagram pages shifted their focus to anti-coup activism after 1 February. (Source: Fullbellies_forlife; Oodtmyanmar)
This kind of pivot to politics from previously apolitical online figures was also noted by Amara Thiha (2010) in his research on the early blogosphere of Myanmar in the 2000s, and how these bloggers pivoted to posting about political topics on the onset of the 2007 Saffron Revolution. Nay Phone Latt, who later became an NLD MP, was one of these early bloggers.
Another notable change in social media usage patterns was the rapid adoption of Twitter by Myanmar users. Before the coup, Twitter usage in Myanmar was far behind Facebook and also lagged behind TikTok and Instagram. Most of Myanmar’s Twitter users were connected to a small minority of journalists, activists, INGO workers and researchers. However, after the coup, noticing that social movements in many other countries leveraged Twitter to amplify their messaging, there was a huge wave of new Twitter users who coordinated to use daily hashtag campaigns to bring the world’s attention to the atrocities that were being committed by the military.
Figures 50 to 55 below show how the Myanmar Twittersphere has developed over the course of the first six months following the coup. Over the course of the project, 400 accounts with at least 100 followers have been tracked and, as is observed in the figures below, the number of interactions and connections change significantly – not least from February to March where there was a steep inflow of new Twitter users from Myanmar and people began to use the platform more actively to raise awareness on the situation in the country.
New users were welcomed by more seasoned users and manuals on how to use Twitter like the ones below were widely shared.
Figure 56: An example of daily hashtag trending guide for those tweeting about the situation in Myanmar (Source: Twitter Trending Guide for Civilian Disobedience Movement)
Perhaps the most important part of the resistance and what has been most effective at stalling the ability of the SAC to exert full control over the country has been the civil disobedience movement. Started by medical workers in the first week of the coup, it quickly spread throughout the civil service and across the country, with the aim of crippling the state apparatus by denying them the ability to govern. From medical workers to teachers, celebrities to a now growing number of military personnel, the CDM has persisted despite the hardships that are faced by those who have taken part in it, ranging from loss of income, to detainment to torture and even death.
Figure 57: Police officers participating in the civil disobedience movement. (Source: Myanmar Now)
Figure 58: Celebrities holding signs to promote the CDM. (Source: Khin Wint Wah)
Even though the internet has been cut and restricted several times and for long periods since the coup, there is no denying that social media has played a pivotal role in the protest movement. Not only have online platforms been crucial in gathering and sharing information, they have also become places to unite and rally around common causes. As a leaderless movement – with several different sub-movements – online spaces have been a place for people to get updated on what was happening around the country and in their local communities. The tech-savvy and digital natives have done their utmost in utilising the platforms to amplify messages and counter the military’s online propaganda efforts.
The term “Psy War”, for instance, which is short for psychological warfare, quickly came to prominent use in social media posts when people wanted to warn others of the military’s attempts at spinning stories or polluting social media with disinformation. The term Psy War has its roots from before social media was widely used in Myanmar. In fact, the military’s media outlets, including Myawaddy TV and key daily newspapers, are under the official control of the military’s so-called Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare.
Figure 59: A post from 7 February warning the public about Psy War. (Source: Hannayuri)
Even as the crackdowns turned violent, protesters continued to express their pro-democracy and anti-coup sentiments in a variety of creative ways. In the first months after the coup, every few days there would be a strike centred around a new concept, from fruits to flowers to traditional holidays.
Figure 60: Different types of strikes for revolutionary Thingyan, an alternative way to protest traditional way of celebrating New Year Festival (Source: Khit Thit Media; DVB TV News; RFA Burmese; Mizzima - News in Burmese)
Some of the protest tactics were designed to disrupt the regular flow of traffic and normal life, so as to get the general population’s attention as well as to thwart the security forces’ crackdowns. For example, bridges that connect Yangon to satellite towns were blocked by protesters' vehicles, with protesters pretending that their vehicles had broken down in the middle of busy roads.
Figure 61: Protesters blocking roads to hinder the movement of security forces. (Source: BBC)
Some protests were targeted at attracting the attention and sympathies of people from outside of Myanmar. For example, slogans were painted on roads that were large enough to be seen from satellites. Further down in this section, we will also talk about how many of the protesters specifically called on the UN’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a prominent message.
Figure 62: A slogan written on a road as seen in a satellite image. (Source: A tweet from Christopher Koettl)
Protest art of many different varieties has been created and shared online, often with imagery showing solidarity and defiance, and the three finger salute as a symbol was prominently featured in many of the artworks, with various artists adapting and reinterpreting the symbol in their own styles.
Figure 63: A screenshot of protest artwork posted on Myanmar Poster Campaign Instagram (Source: Myanmar Poster Campaign)
Although most of the new artworks have been shared online, there have also been campaigns to bring the artworks to the offline world, such as the 100 Projectors Movement which projected protest art onto the sides of buildings.
Figure 64: Protesters projecting artworks to a building. (Source: 100 Projectors)
The protest movement quickly identified that the powerful military-owned conglomerates –namely MEHL and MEC – have a great deal of control over the country’s economy, and the revenues from these companies fund the military’s oppression. As a consequence, people started systematically boycotting products that were produced and sold by companies affiliated with the military, and also lobbied for foreign investors to cut ties with Myanmar to deny sources of funding for the SAC. This has resulted in some large investors, such as the oil company Chevron and the food and beverage giant Kirin, pulling out of the country.
Figure 65: A list of military-owned businesses to boycott. (Source: Boycott Myanmar Military Movement)
Because of the military’s decades-long stranglehold on power in Myanmar, it can often feel like their dominance is inevitable. The reforms of the Thein Sein era and subsequent dominance of the NLD in the polls had slowly convinced people that the military’s power was waning, despite their constitutionally guaranteed control of important ministries, independence from civilian oversight, 25 percent guaranteed seats in the parliaments and massive economic power through military owned conglomerates. And yet, important political wins for the civilian administration, such as moving the nationwide bureaucracy of the General Administrative Department into civilian control, made it seem like the military’s power was slowly being chipped away.
All of this changed overnight on 1 February, and people in Myanmar might end up looking back at the partial democratic rule of the 2010s the same way they are nostalgic about the brief period of parliamentary democracy before the 1962 coup.
However, the anti-coup movement that has emerged shared a broad-based belief that the coup attempt was made from a position of desperation rather than one of strength. The protest movement has singled out Min Aung Hlaing as the main lynchpin of the coup, and on social media, there is a pervasive narrative that Min Aung Hlaing is just not as competent or cunning as his predecessors. His diminutive height is the subject of many jokes, and his motives for the coup are presented as entirely selfish due to his unwillingness to go into retirement as he should have in 2021.
The trope of “the stupid coup” is a widely shared idea among those in the protest movement. Regardless of whether this is actually true, the belief that the protest movement’s adversaries have poorly thought out plans and are constantly fumbling is a morale booster.
Figure 66: Posts mocking the ineptitude and stupidity of the coup leader, Min Aung Hlaing (Source: Maung Zarni’s Tweet)
Not only have the protesters homed in on the coup leadership’s selfishness and incompetence, there have also been many posts sharing anecdotes and photographic and video evidence that the military as an entire institution – even if they had been formidable in the past – is now a shadow of its former self, rife with incompetence and corruption. Memorable examples include how the military raided the offices of Mizzima media and took away only the monitors of the computers in the office and left the system units behind, and a video of an armoured personnel carrier broken down in the middle of a main road in Yangon while protesters taunted the soldiers inside.
Figure 67: Soldiers raiding the office of Mizzima media took away the monitors while leaving the system units behind. (Source: IronGirl CoC Gaming)
Figure 68: Protesters shouting “Happy New Year” to mock the soldiers who used sound grenades to scare people. (Source: Feeling Music)
Figure 69: A tweet showing a man mocking soldiers struggling with a broken down tank in the middle of the road. (Source: Latt Thone Chaung)
Myanmar is not the only country experiencing a significant reversal of democratic freedoms. Across Asia, authoritarian regimes are growing in power. Myanmar’s protesters were welcomed into the so-called “Milk Tea Alliance” of pro-democracy movements that included Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and India.
Digital activists from online communities such as Anonymous have also been helping the protest movement in Myanmar by uncovering the digital surveillance technologies used by the Tatmadaw and by leaking datasets that uncovered business connections with the military.
Figure 70: A tweet from Anonymous asserting the role of China and Russia behind the coup. (Source: Anonymous)
In the months following the coup, the direction of the resistance movement has gradually changed with evolving patterns and goals. Collectively known as the Spring Revolution, the anti-coup activities started with protests, CDM, boycotts, banging pots and pans and social punishments. Within the first week of protests, people called for the return of power to the elected government based on the 2020 election result and release of the detained leaders and politicians. However, due to the brutal crackdowns, killing over 900 people and arresting over 5,000, the direction of the resistance movement has changed. Protests began to shift to the armed resistance with the goal of total annihilation of the military.
At the beginning of the protest movement, people focused on creating international awareness and encouraging participation in the civil disobedience movement. Protests were designed to grab attention, using striking costumes and powerful messages. Night-time campaigns of banging pots and pans were meant to show objection to the military takeover.
Figure 71: Illustrations showing the different ways of protesting, including CDM, demonstrations, banging pots and pans and sharing information. (Source: ထာဝရဧကရီ)
Figure 72: Demonstrations with creative costumes and slogans (Source: BBC News; A Tweet from Mizzima)
After the intensifying crackdowns, protest strategies have changed. Gradually, makeshift barricades as defence mechanisms began appearing. Many campaign movements started to shift online under different themes. Some protests became human-less, with only boards and other iconic objects. At the same time, some protesters tested night-time demonstrations, which gained popularity in the middle of March.
Figure 73: Barricades used by protesters as a defence mechanism. (Source: Reuters; the Conservation)
Figure 74: A post about human-less protests. (Source: Matthew Tostevin)
Figure 75: A night-time protest in Heldan, Yangon, on 13 March. (Source: BBC Burmese)
With growing bitterness towards the military’s killings, people started to bear arms to defend themselves and take down the dictatorship. The Tatmadaw’s defeat during clashes with ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) made people aware that it was possible to actually fight the military, as long as the armed groups stood together. With the formation of the People’s Defence Force, the clashes became more frequent, making most of the Tatmadaw soldiers avoid participating in the fighting out of fear that they might get bombed or killed under guerrilla warfare.
Many bombings have started taking place all over the country, although there is a possibility that they are being orchestrated by the military, the PDF or Pyusawhtee groups. Many ward administrators have been stabbed and later shot to death, signalling the growing possibility of urban warfare. There is also an increasing tendency of people to celebrate the deaths of Tatmadaw soldiers during clashes with either EAOs or PDFs. All in all, the situation is moving into a new, unknown and mostly more deadly area.
Figure 76: The evolution of military trucks after the coup; they are now equipped with extra layers to protect against ambush attacks. (Source: Aung Toe - Travelling Bamar)
Figure 77: Posts trolling the deaths of military-appointed ward administrators and soldiers. (Source: Han Nyein; Current Affairs; Zalen)
Figure 78: A post speculating on the possibility of urban warfare. (Source: DreaM)
On 22 June, the military clashed with PDF in Mandalay, and many have marked this event as a possible turning point in the resistance movement, where urban warfare between resistance fighters and the military will ensue. Although the first five months of the coup have resulted in much bloodshed, with over 800 lives being taken by the military and thousands more detained, it has also been a period where solidarity across vast swaths of Myanmar’s demographic groups was clearly seen and protesters used many creative methods to express their voices.
What follows might be a situation in which there are fewer opportunities for peaceful protests, and less transparency about events that are taking place because they have turned more violent and thus both difficult and sensitive to document.
At the beginning of the protests, people talked about the possibility of UN intervention (under the so-called R2P doctrine) with high certainty. However, the United Nations Security Council, due to objections from China and Russia, could not reach a consensus to even condemn the coup, let alone impose concrete action. People’s frustration grew as the international community continued to issue statements without effectively and/or openly supporting the resistance movement. Most importantly, ASEAN’s five-point consensus was viewed as a chance to strengthen the legitimacy of the military regime, leading people to ascertain that the protesters could not count on assistance from the international community and would have to start fighting on their own.
Figure 80: Protesters calling for R2P. (Source: DVB TV News)
Figure 81: A post claiming that non-violent protests are crucial for the U.N intervention (Source: A group post at နေ့သစ်မြန်မာ - Nae Thit Myanmar)
Just as the protests have changed so has the tone on social media, from voicing indignation and calling for action to the use of harsher language and posting of content showing an increasing need for revenge against the military and security forces.
One example is the calls for social punishments on social media targeted at individuals who are believed to be family members of military and SAC officials. The campaigns seek to isolate and shame individuals into renouncing their ties to the military or, in turn, use their proximity to pressure their family members who are in the military or SAC.
Figure 82: A post about the suspension of Ma Naing Naing Aye from her position at UNESCO as a social punishment campaign called for her resignation after finding out that she is the daughter of a military-appointed minister. (Source: DHA NA - ဓန)
While the military regime has overwhelmingly used scare and shock tactics, the growing tensions between the Tatmadaw and the rest of the population, EAOs and the newly formed PDF groups have resulted in these groups relying on similar tactics to threaten those collaborating with the military. For example, in the images below, a warning letter stated that those reporting to the army or the police would be kicked out of the community, and the lives of their family members would not be guaranteed.
Figure 83: A post warning that the lives of the family members of pro-military informants, soldiers and police officers are not guaranteed. (Source: May Thingyan Hein-Myitmakha)
During the last couple of months, more than a dozen ward administrators and military informants have been killed — both as a means to seek revenge and to scare those working for the military regime.
