\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI believe that the Chinese government think that the Uighur nationalism issue has been stoked by the US, which is an interesting parallel to the \u201cRussian bots\u201d issue.
And then there\u2019s the \u201cRohingya as poor refugee victims and not rightfully repelled hostile invaders\u201d issue, who knows where the government of Burma thinks that comes from.
\nPeople hoping to tame social media back towards Official Narratives for the sake of maintaining national security and social integrity really haven\u2019t grappled with that example enough
\nHostile invaders?\u00a0\u00a0
\nI caught slightly less than the average about that one.\u00a0 What happened here?\u00a0 Someone invaded Myanmar?\u00a0\u00a0
\n/Though my personal favorite in this vein is:\u00a0\u201cRussia invaded Georgia in 2008\u201d..\u00a0\u00a0
\nI mean, according to the local government, yes, Bangladeshi migrants who had been settling in Myanmar launched a wave of violent attacks as part of an attempt to colonize sovereign land and the country mobilized against them, including on Facebook
\nAccording to most of the US establishment, no, Myanmar cranked up the oppression on a Muslim minority that has been an integral part of the country since its founding but severely repressed ever since by encouraging communal violence towards a goal of ethnic cleansing, including on Facebook
\n@poipoipoi-2016 the de-facto border between Georgia and South Ossetia in 2008 did not follow ethnic lines; the Ossetians had been ethnically cleansing Georgian villages on their side of the line and the Russian\u00a0\u201cpeackeepers\u201d, who were not authorized to be there by the UN anyway, had not been doing anything about it.\u00a0 So while the John McCain version of what was happening at the time might be wrong, the\u00a0\u201cGeorgia started it\u201d narrative is also not exactly accurate.
\n@kontextmaschine you seem to be implying that the local version is more accurate.\u00a0 Do you have evidence for this, or is it just contrarianism.
\n
It\u2019s not that that\u2019s a more accurate account but that that\u2019s the understanding sincerely held by Burmese government and normie civil society. If you asked them how social media could contribute to maintaining a healthy culture, national security, and social stability, they\u2019d tip the online rallying against the Rohingya as an A+ model to imitate.
And really, what\u2019s the alternative, the platforms for everyone\u2019s National Conversation are explicitly patrolled to uphold the US Establishment line, with the ability of national establishments to mobilize against perceived existential threats subject to veto by the people who wanted to Stop Kony (or even more cynically, the people with higher K Street lobbying budgets)? Any government with any sense would ban that immediately.
What I\u2019m saying is, people talk about government and civil society pressuring social media to control information flows to create a \u201chealthy culture\u201d as if the question is the relative influence of domestic culture war factions, but it\u2019s really worth remembering that America, and the first world in general, represent an increasingly narrow slice of a user base relative to places like, say, India, where the government and civil society is more and more holding that a healthy culture is an explicitly Hindu supremacist one
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