5/19/2025 Myanmar (International Christian Concern) — An air strike last week has, yet again, shined a spotlight on the cruel tactics used by the military junta ruling Myanmar. The strike, which took place in Myanmar’s Sagaing region, hit a school. Twenty students and two teachers were killed, with witnesses describing the mangled bodies of children in the gory aftermath of the incident.

Adding to the injustice, the strike occurred during a ceasefire announced due to the recent devastating earthquakes.
The junta, also known as the Tatmadaw, denied the strike and called the reporting on the event disinformation driven by anti-regime forces. However, physical evidence at the site and multiple sources corroborated the incident and countered Tatmadaw’s protestations of innocence.

The Tatmadaw immediately took advantage of the chaos and destruction caused by the earthquake, bombing the Sagaing area — a strategic opposition stronghold and the earthquake’s epicenter — just hours after the disaster struck, but later announced a ceasefire that it has repeatedly broken.

According to Nay Phone Latt, a prominent commentator on the Tatmadaw, social media activity in the wake of the strike has increasingly borne marks of regime propaganda. “The number of comments from fake accounts has increased significantly,” Nay Phone Latt was quoted as saying by Myanmar Now. “When you look at these comments, you find that the profiles are locked. The narratives they write don’t differ much from one another. Patterns like these have become quite noticeable.”

The Tatmadaw has long used social media — Facebook, particularly, given its widespread popularity in the country — to spread disinformation and to sow hatred against ethnoreligious minorities in the country.

There, it gained a significant following after Myanmar began opening to the outside world in 2010 by partnering with local providers to preload Facebook on new phones and grant users free internet access to the social media platform.

In 2016, with 40% of the country able to access the internet, 38% said, in a poll, that their primary source of news was what they saw on Facebook. “Even Burmese slang reflects the fact that in Myanmar, Facebook is the internet,” according to a 2020 article in Foreign Policy. There, “the word for ‘going online,’ line paw tat tal, is synonymous with ‘active on Facebook.’”

Unfortunately, Facebook’s growth in the country did not come with a corresponding content moderation capacity. Hate speech against the Muslim-majority Rohingya minority quickly soared — a pattern perpetuated by certain Buddhist extremists and many across the Buddhist-majority country who believed the misinformation they saw on Facebook.

Researchers and activists who spoke with Facebook to warn it of the rising anti-minority hatred spreading on their platform were largely ignored. Aela Callan, a researcher, met with Facebook in 2013 and learned that Facebook had only a single Burmese-speaking content moderator to manage content produced by millions.

Sadly, the religious hatred-fueled physical violence, exacerbated and furthering what would eventually be condemned as a religious and ethnic genocide against the Rohingya.

In March of this year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a report criticizing the Tatmadaw for its systematic repression of religious minorities and urging the international community to increase attention to the plight of the persecuted in Myanmar.

“The country has seen the displacement of over 3.5 million people in recent years,” the USCIRF report noted, “including more than 90,000 in Christian-majority Chin State, 237,200 in Kachin State, and one million Muslim-majority Rohingya refugees.” Last week’s earthquake and the airstrikes that followed have only increased these high levels of displacement.

Though a strong majority of the population is ethnic Burman, and an even greater percentage is Buddhist, the communities that make up the remainder are well-established, well-organized, and for the most part predate the formation of the modern state by centuries.

In many cases, Myanmar’s ethnic minorities have taken on a distinct religious identity as well. About 20% to 30% of ethnic Karen are Christians, while other groups — such as the Chin — are more than 90% Christian. This overlap of ethnic and religious identity has created a volatile situation for believers.

Representing an extremist interpretation of Buddhism, the Tatmadaw has a long history of violence against the people of Myanmar, including against ethnic and religious minorities like the Muslim-majority Rohingya and the Christian-majority Chin.

The junta is known to abduct children, forcing them to walk ahead of their troops through minefields. In many cases, their victims are members of ethnic and religious minority communities fighting back against the atrocities of a military that has waged a decades-long war of ethnic and religious cleansing.

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