The Responsibility to Protect in a Digital Age

The 1st February 2021 coup abruptly ended a decade of civilian rule in Myanmar. In subsequent weeks, we have witnessed the liberating potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) and new social media. A tech-savvy generation of Myanmar youth have brought their protests to Facebook, Twitter and other social media (SoMe) platforms. However, SoMe platforms, notably Facebook, have previously played an important role as channels for the spread of hate speech and for inciting violence against minorities.

Protesters on 7 February 2021 in downtown Yangon, Myanmar. (Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images)

Mass atrocity prevention rarely makes it to the top of the agenda in public policy debates related to the regulation of SoMe platforms. Nevertheless, as the Myanmar experience shows, there is an “atrocity gap” in international human rights protection that needs to be closed for an effective application of R2P online as well as in the real world.

A level playing field for competition - more than human rights protection

The role of ICT and SoMe in the current protests in Myanmar is the result of a generation that has grown up in a politically more liberal atmosphere over the past decade, with access to internet and social media. Liberalisation of the telecommunications sector was indeed a significant part of the political changes that were initiated in the country in 2011 when the transition from military to civilian rule first began. This transition made smartphones, sim cards, and access to the internet more widely available for people across the country, and SoMe platforms, notably Facebook, emerged as the main access point to the internet for many people.  

However, as SoMe came to play an active part in daily life in Myanmar, the initial speed of the proliferation of new media and telecommunications in the country far outstripped any legal reform and efforts to protect fundamental rights. In a recent article in Global Responsibility to Protect, I have examined some challenges for human rights protection and mass atrocity prevention in the telecommunications sector in Myanmar before the coup and how Myanmar became a case where the use of SoMe platforms, Facebook in particular, contributed to the facilitation of mass atrocity crimes.

Even before the coup, the quick decision by international companies to enter Myanmar around 2011–12 - including Telenor, which was granted a licence in 2012 - contributed to ensuring that there were few regulations and little preparation in place to address potential negative human rights impacts of Myanmar’s entry into a digital age. As I discuss in the article, legal and policy reforms in the transition period before the coup, including reforms initiated with international assistance, tended more towards creating a level playing field for market competition that would encourage international companies to enter Myanmar and were more reflective of a paradigm of control than of human rights protection and mass atrocity prevention.

A Burmese monk walks by an advertisement for Qatar's Ooredoo telecom company, in Yangon, Myanmar. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Hate speech, SoMe platforms and ineffective self-regulation 

As the transition proceeded in the years after 2011, SoMe platforms came to serve as spaces both for human rights activism and for inciting human rights abuses against vulnerable minorities. It is well documented that both the state and civil society in Myanmar used Facebook to foment violence and mass atrocities against the Rohingya and other vulnerable minorities after 2012. In September 2019, an independent fact-finding mission established by the UN Human Rights Council to examine abuses in ethnic areas of Myanmar published its final report. The mission concluded that SoMe platforms, notably Facebook, had been extensively used by the Myanmar military, government officials, nationalist monks and other actors in the preceding years to propagate hate speech and disinformation as well as to foment violence.

While mass atrocities have taken place in Myanmar in the absence of social media, SoMe platforms, notably Facebook, thus came to play a major role as channels for the spread of hate speech and for inciting violence against vulnerable individuals and groups over the past decade. At the same time, effort at effective regulation were sorely lacking. SoMe platforms have often argued in favour of self-regulation, but in this context, Facebook was slow in catching up and developing an effective response to the misuse of its platform for malicious purposes. Myanmar came to exemplify what can be called an atrocity gap in international human rights protection. As such, I argue that the situation in Myanmar presents a challenge to the application of the norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in a digital age.

Mass atrocity crimes and R2P on the internet

When the UN General Assembly adopted the norm of R2P in 2005, it sought to address the thorny issue of state sovereignty inhibiting intervention in the face of mass atrocities and to improve the ability of the UN system and member states to respond and react to manmade disasters. The focus was on state responsibilities, while the significance of widespread use of ICT and the global role of new media was yet to be anticipated. For a long time, the UN system remained slow in recognising the role of SoMe platforms and internet service providers, not only as channels of information, but also as powerful actors in a global economy. While this is no longer in doubt amidst global debates on the need for better regulation of SoMe platforms to address concerns about the risks posed by artificial intelligence and the distribution of ‘fake news’ and misinformation, mass atrocity prevention, however, still rarely makes it to the top of the agenda in these debates.

There is a need to better understand how SoMe platforms are used by state and non-state actors alike in the commission of mass atrocities in order to ensure an effective application of R2P online as well as offline. The question of regulation when it comes to the internet and SoMe raises difficult dilemmas of protecting spaces important for freedom of expression while at the same time preventing these spaces from being used for malicious purposes. The use of SoMe by the civil disobedience movement in Myanmar after the coup of February 2021 illustrates the potential force such platforms can have in pro-democracy struggles. However, given the historical role of hate speech in inciting mass atrocities, the global influence of new social media and the preponderance that SoMe platforms and internet service providers currently hold in shaping global internet and SoMe governance, questions should also be raised as to the status and responsibilities of these platforms and companies in the face of mass atrocity crimes.

Reference: Buzzi, Camilla. 2021. ‘Mass Atrocities in Myanmar and the Responsibility to Protect in a Digital Age’. In: Global Responsibility to Protect 2021, pp. 1-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/1875-984X-13020001.

Biographical note:

Camilla Buzzi is Associate Professor – Bachelor in Social Work at Østfold University College, Norway and holds a PhD in international human rights and peace studies from Mahidol University, Thailand as well as a graduate degree in political science from the University of Oslo, Norway. She is a former coordinator for PD Burma and a former Myanmar country manager for Norwegian Church Aid and lived in Myanmar during 2012-2018. The opinions expressed in the article are her own.