On February 1, 2021, the day the Myanmar military launched an early morning raid to arrest key politicians and seize political power, a seemingly innocuous post appeared on a Facebook group dedicated to Myanmar agriculture. Dimmed in bright blue colors and large print, the text read: “I am farm staff. So, I have a habit of using herbicide when I see green. Be careful.
By combining a reference to the Myanmar military—the green color of the soldiers’ uniforms and the army’s political party—with a typical agricultural activity—the use of herbicides to kill weeds—the slogan tied a cultural reference. common to daily agricultural work by a revolutionary movement. end. The post came from “farm staff,” a reference to government employees within the Ministry of Agriculture, and anticipated the Civil Disobedience Movement that would take off in the coming days with widespread strikes against the junta takeover. Posted to a public group with more than 118,000 members, the post showcased the rural nature of the online challenge.
in a new open access article on Big Data and Society, we discuss this and other examples of what we call organic online politics: forms of digital mobilization that arise from specific conditions, material concerns, and repertoires of resistance in the field. We demonstrate how, after Myanmar’s military coup, Facebook users in farming groups harnessed the platform’s capabilities to respond to the democratic crisis in ways rooted in farming histories. More generally, this concept highlights the ways in which rural dynamics shape data practices.
Focusing on the role of rural places in digital mobilization is vital, not only because two-thirds of the world’s low-income countries are rural, but also because of the central role that rural people have historically played in revolutions. global. Analyzing the agrarian dynamics of online dissent allows us to root data politics in longer patterns of rural resistance and to see how distinctive forms of rural mobilization weave into broader political struggles.
In the case of Myanmar, farmers’ Facebook groups shaped the trajectory of anti-authoritarian mobilization through farmer protests and tractor protests, along with strategic actions to default on farm bank loans. Farmer groups were also some of the first dissidents to draw attention to food safety and supply chain issues, critical dynamics that would shape the possibilities for protest in the coming months.
Southeast Asia has become a hotbed of both digital activism and digital disinformation and surveillance in recent years, a trend that accompanies the resurgent authoritarianism and leads to new questions about data justice. But with remarkable exceptionsLimited work has considered the role that digital connection plays in rural policy in the region.
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Digital contention in Myanmar after the coup
Dissent on social media is likely to have facilitated a civil disobedience movement with greater grassroots support than ever before, a development the Tatmadaw might find difficult to stop.
This is not a minor matter. Classic studies of rural resistance in Southeast Asia, including the work of James Scott, Gillian Hart and Tania Li, highlight that rural politics takes many different forms. Today, the countries of the region have a substantial rural population, predominantly composed of small farmers. Given the persistence of village life and agricultural livelihoods, it is important to understand how rural conditions and concerns shape digital mobilization.
Our own research grew out of the previous experience of our research team, including Watching smartphones arrive in the Myanmar countryside and monitor hate speech on Myanmar Facebook. In late 2020, we started digital ethnography and then large-scale monitoring of more than 200 Burmese-language agriculture-related Facebook pages and groups. We use Crowdtangle, a public content monitoring tool owned by Meta (see funding disclosure below), to collect featured posts each week, then code them by topic and discuss them as a team. Eventually, we amassed an original archive of over 2,000 popular posts.
Our original goal was to understand how farmers and traders used social media. Facebook moved quickly to protect customers after Myanmar privatized telecommunications in 2014, becoming Myanmar’s dominant platform and one of the main ways Myanmar people experienced the internet. Agriculture-related Facebook groups and pages proliferated. For the estimated two-thirds of Myanmar’s population who live in rural areas and depend, at least in part, on agriculture, they provided vital sources of agricultural trade and knowledge.
All this changed after the coup. As we continue to collect and analyze data from farm groups, we saw a massive drop in overall Internet traffic, a reduction that corresponded to the military junta’s Internet shutdowns, restrictions against Facebook use, and targeted censorship. But we also found changes in the content of these groups. In line with broader trends in Myanmar FacebookIn the days and weeks that followed the coup, peasant groups erupted with political news and calls to support the Civil Disobedience Movement. After peaceful protests faced brutal crackdowns, images and information on how to protect yourself from violence increased.
The following figure shows the immediate shift towards political content after the coup, highlighting the spikes on the key dates of the protests. But it also shows the eventual return to more banal practices of selling seeds and exchanging farm tips, as fear and self-censorship took hold.
One surprising finding from our research is that patterns of online dissent in agricultural Facebook groups were distinct from those in urban areas. Online politics is shaped not only by authoritarian repression and national political trajectories, but also by rural communities and their histories. In the days after the coup, the groups worried about food prices and the collapse of the rice market. Practical concerns were interwoven with existential crises. One post stated: “Because of the coup, the whole country is in crisis. It’s not just the price of rice; there will be damage to everything.” Another lamented and called for action: “We fear not only for the rice market but also for the future of our generation. So now the youth are on their way to strike.”
The publications noted that the suffering was nothing new for farmers. In one image that circulated among several farming groups, an elderly man stands with his fist raised in a protest line of men, similarly dressed in the familiar rural garb of baseball caps, flip-flops and traditional longs. In his other hand he holds a cardboard sign that reads: “Farmers do not want to go back to the era of the rice tax.” This poignant reference to the poverty and hardship suffered by farmers under a previous regime exemplifies the ways in which online dissent drew on rural histories.
Documenting resistance, such as the farmer and tractor protests pictured above, and calling for particular forms of dissent, such as posts urging farmers to default on government farm bank loans, Myanmar Farmers Facebook groups powerfully shaped the anti-authoritarian mobilization. Their demands identified specific needs, from agricultural inputs to export markets, while drawing attention to the critical role of farmers in maintaining the land, feeding the country, and financing the state.
Since we collected our data in early 2021, a lot has changed. While Facebook provided fertile ground for public dissent in the opening months of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, internet restrictions and surveillance, skyrocketing data costs and targeted arrests of online influencers social media, meant online activity was suppressed. yousers have splintered on Twitter, Tiktok and encrypted apps like Signal and Telegram. Digital mobilization has not stopped, but has adapted from public dissent to click-to-donate campaigns, video gamesand YouTube videos of revolutionary songs posted by accounts that promise to use ad revenue to fund anti-military forces and displaced people.
These innovative ways to circumvent online repression present new methodological challenges, even as they demonstrate the creativity of resistance. Doing this research together was difficult, exhilarating, and at times heartbreaking. Our analysis shows how digital mobilization builds on land resistance and renewal, and gives us deep respect for the Myanmar people at home and abroad who continue to employ digital tools in the ongoing struggle for freedom.
Disclosure: Data collection and analysis were funded by a Facebook Research grant on digital literacy, demographics, and misinformation. Facebook did not oversee or control the research process and did not review the analysis or findings.