Farmers, Facebook and Myanmar’s coup

On 1 February 2021, the day Myanmar’s navy launched an early morning raid to arrest key politicians and seize political energy, a seemingly innocuous publish appeared on a Fb group dedicated to Myanmar agriculture. Memifed with vibrant blue colors and huge font, the textual content learn: “I’m agricultural workers. So, I’ve a behavior of utilizing herbicide after I see inexperienced. Be warned.”

By combining a reference to the Myanmar navy—the inexperienced color of troopers’ uniforms and the military’s political social gathering—with a typical farming exercise—using herbicide to kill weeds—the slogan yoked a typical cultural reference to on a regular basis agrarian work for a revolutionary finish. The publish got here from “agricultural workers,” a reference to authorities workers throughout the Ministry of Agriculture, and anticipated the Civil Disobedience Motion that may take off within the coming days with widespread strikes towards the junta’s takeover. Revealed in a public group with over 118,000 members, the publish showcased the agricultural character of on-line defiance.

In a brand new open entry article in Huge Knowledge & Society, we analyse this and different examples of what we name natural on-line politics: types of digital mobilisation that develop from particular circumstances, materials issues, and repertoires of resistance within the countryside. We display how, after Myanmar’s navy coup, Fb customers in farming teams harnessed the platform’s affordances to reply to democratic disaster in methods rooted in agrarian histories. Extra broadly, this idea brings into focus the methods wherein rural dynamics form knowledge practices.

Specializing in the position of rural locations in digital mobilisation is important, not solely as a result of two thirds of the inhabitants of the world’s low-income nations is rural, but additionally due to the central position that rural folks have traditionally performed in world revolutions. Analysing the agrarian dynamics of on-line dissent permits us to root knowledge politics in longer patterns of rural resistance, and to see how distinctive types of rural mobilisation are woven into broader political struggles.

Within the case of Myanmar, farmers’ Fb teams formed the trajectory of anti-authoritarian mobilisation by way of farmer protests and tractor protests, coupled with strategic actions to renege on agricultural financial institution loans. Farmers’ teams have been additionally among the first dissidents to name consideration to meals safety and provide chain points—vital dynamics that may come to form the chances for protest within the months to come back.

Southeast Asia has turn out to be a hotbed of each digital activism and digital disinformation and surveillance in recent times, a development that accompanies resurgent authoritarianism and results in new questions on knowledge justice. However, with notable exceptions, restricted work has thought-about the position digital connection performs within the area’s rural politics.

That is no small matter. Traditional research of rural resistance in Southeast Asia, together with works by James Scott, Gillian Hart, and Tania Li, spotlight that rural politics take distinct varieties. Immediately, nations within the area have substantial rural populations, predominantly comprised of smallholder farmers. Given the persistence of village life and farming livelihoods, you will need to perceive how rural circumstances and issues form digital mobilisation.

Our personal inquiry emerged from our analysis group’s earlier expertise, together with watching smartphones arrive to Myanmar’s countryside and monitoring the hate speech on Myanmar Fb. In late 2020, we started digital ethnography after which large-scale monitoring of over 200 Burmese language Fb pages and teams associated to agriculture. We used Crowdtangle, a public content material monitoring device owned by Meta [see funding disclosure below], to gather prime posts every week, after which coded them thematically and mentioned them as a group. Finally, we amassed an unique archive of over 2,000 in style posts.

Our unique intention was to know how farmers and merchants have been utilizing social media. Fb moved shortly to safe prospects after Myanmar privatised telecommunications in 2014, changing into Myanmar’s dominant platform and one of many main ways in which Myanmar folks skilled the web. Fb teams and pages associated to agriculture proliferated. For the estimated two thirds of Myanmar’s inhabitants who dwell in rural areas and rely, not less than partly, on farming, these supplied very important sources of agrarian commerce and information.

All this modified after the coup. As we continued to gather and analyse knowledge from farming teams, we noticed an enormous drop off in general web site visitors, a downshift that corresponded to the navy junta’s web shutdowns, restrictions towards utilizing Fb, and focused censorship. However we additionally discovered modifications within the content material of those teams. According to broader developments throughout Myanmar Fb, within the days and weeks that adopted the coup, farming teams erupted with political information and calls to assist the Civil Disobedience Motion. After peaceable protests have been met with brutal crackdowns, photographs of and details about defending oneself from violence elevated.

The determine under shows the speedy shift in direction of political content material after the coup, highlighting spikes on key protest dates. However it additionally exhibits the eventual return to extra banal practices of promoting seeds and exchanging agricultural recommendation, as worry and self-censorship took maintain.

A placing discovering from our analysis is that patterns of on-line dissent in farming Fb teams have been distinct from these in city areas. On-line politics are formed not solely by authoritarian repression and nationwide political trajectories, but additionally by rural communities and their histories. Within the days after the coup, teams full of issues over meals costs and rice market collapse. Sensible worries have been interwoven with existential crises. One publish declared: “As a result of coup, the entire nation is in turmoil. It’s not simply the value of rice; there will probably be harm to all the pieces.” One other mourned, and known as for motion: “We worry not just for the rice market but additionally for the way forward for our technology. So, now the youth are on the street to strike.”

Posts identified that struggling was nothing new for farmers. In a single picture that circulated throughout a number of agriculture teams, an outdated man stands with a raised fist in a protest line of males, equally clad within the acquainted rural apparel of baseball hats, flip flops, and conventional longyis. In his different hand, he holds a cardboard signal that claims: “We farmers don’t need to return to the period of the rice tax.” This poignant reference to the poverty and hardships farmers endured below a earlier regime exemplifies the methods wherein on-line dissent was grounded in rural histories.

By documenting resistance, such because the farmers’ and tractor protests proven above, and calling for explicit types of dissent, similar to posts urging farmers to not repay loans from the federal government agricultural financial institution, Myanmar farmers’ Fb teams powerfully formed anti-authoritarian mobilisation. Their calls for pinpointed particular wants—from agricultural inputs to export markets—whereas bringing vital consideration to farmers’ pivotal position in sustaining the land, feeding the nation, and financing the state.

Since we collected our knowledge in early 2021, a lot has modified. Whereas Fb supplied fertile floor for public dissent within the preliminary months of the Myanmar Spring Revolution, web restrictions and surveillance, in addition to skyrocketing knowledge prices and focused arrests of social media influencers, have meant that on-line exercise has been suppressed. Customers have splintered throughout Twitter, Tiktok, and encrypted apps like Sign and Telegram. Digital mobilisation has not stopped, however quite tailored from public dissent to click-to-donate campaigns, video video games, and YouTube movies of revolutionary songs posted by accounts that promise to make use of promoting income to fund anti-military forces and displaced folks.

These revolutionary methods of circumventing on-line repression current new methodological challenges, at the same time as they proof the creativity of the resistance. Doing this analysis collectively was tough, invigorating, and, at instances, heartbreaking. Our evaluation exhibits how digital mobilisation is grounded in agrarian resistance and renewal, and endows us with deep respect for Myanmar folks at dwelling and overseas who proceed to make use of digital instruments within the ongoing battle for freedom.

Disclosure: Knowledge assortment and evaluation have been funded by a grant from Fb Analysis on digital literacy, demographics and misinformation. Fb had no oversight or management over the analysis course of and has not reviewed the evaluation or findings.