May 20, 2025
A recent airstrike by Myanmar’s ruling military junta, the Tatmadaw, has once again drawn global outrage after it targeted a school in the Sagaing region, killing twenty children and two teachers. The strike, which occurred amid a ceasefire declared following a devastating earthquake, highlights the regime’s blatant disregard for civilian life and international norms. Despite overwhelming physical evidence and eyewitness accounts, the junta dismissed the incident as disinformation, part of its ongoing campaign to suppress opposition and control the narrative. Observers report that the Tatmadaw exploited the post-earthquake chaos to bomb opposition strongholds, violating their own ceasefire and intensifying an already dire humanitarian crisis. Social media platforms have seen a spike in coordinated disinformation efforts, with fake accounts echoing regime propaganda—further evidence of the Tatmadaw’s weaponization of information.
This propaganda machine, especially through Facebook, has fueled long-standing ethnoreligious tensions. Since Myanmar's opening to the outside world in 2010, Facebook became the nation’s de facto internet, yet its rapid spread wasn’t matched with adequate content moderation. Anti-Rohingya hate speech surged, inflamed by extremist Buddhist voices and amplified through unchecked misinformation. Despite repeated warnings from researchers, Facebook maintained only minimal Burmese-language oversight, enabling a digital environment that contributed to real-world violence and what the U.N. later identified as genocide. The Tatmadaw’s systematic persecution of minorities—including Rohingya Muslims and Chin and Karen Christians—has displaced millions. These communities, defined as much by their faith as their ethnicity, remain targets of brutal repression in a country where the dominant regime uses both military force and digital manipulation to maintain control and silence dissent.
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SOURCE: International Christian Concern