Is Facebook following government orders in Myanmar?

The journalists whom Facebook recruited to check the spread of policitized disinformation campaigns have called for an end to the program because Facebook has consistently ignored their recommendations, especially when they conflicted with the desires of big spending advertisers -- the factcheckers even accuse Facebook of ignoring warnings about the disinformation campaign that led to the genocidal attacks on the Royhinga in Myanmar. Read the rest

Rojinessa labored through the night and gave birth to a baby boy around dawn. Her mother delivered the baby. No doctors were present. No midwives. No beeping machines. Rojinessa became a mother in a tent with a bare concrete floor, a plastic sheet roof, and no running water. She is a Rohingya refugee, living in Ukhia, Bangladesh, with more than 650,000 other refugees who have fled the grotesque and incomprehensible genocide ravaging her people in Burma.

Myanmar has been a technologically backwards authoritarian state for much of the past 50 years, with less than 1% of the country connected to the net, until 2015, when the country held its first elections in decades, a moment that was swiftly followed by a relaxation in telcoms controls and widespread access to the internet via mobile devices. Read the rest

One of the casualties of Myanmar's 1962 coup was the Burmese cat, which had to be repatriated from from foreign pedigreed stock about ten years ago. Wong How Man of China Exploration and Research Society describes how he reintroduced them. Read the rest

Check out this amazing photo essay of punk rock in Myanmar (Burma) by Olaf Schuelke for Roads & Kingdoms. [HT: Michelle Borok/Giant Robot] Read the rest

Apropos of yesterday's post about punks in Myanmar, Rene from Nerdcore sez, " German Journalist Alexander Dluzak did a documentary about the Burma punk scene a few months ago, here's the trailer (with English Subs), he also sent me some pretty awesome pics for my blog which you can see here. They also did a successful crowdfunding campaign and the DVD should be out sometime soon. Read the rest