Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/15/50-million-people-in-myanmar-c.html
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Perhaps worst of all, they are one of the only remaining countries not using the metric system.
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It’s always claimed – possibly falsely – that the porn industry is the first to exploit any new technology.
Now we know that bigotry is the second.
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People being people - internet doesn’t change that.
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Perhaps in the same way that the internet didn’t change entertainment or commerce or get information. People still watch things, buy things and find things out. I’m not sure approach that handles all of the variables and effects well.
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I am kind of puzzled myself by the Facebook narrative here. Were there no lynch mobs before the advent of the internet? Was Myanmar a more peaceful place under the dictatorship?
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In cases like this and right-wing populist movements elsewhere, the Internet just acts as an amplifier for arseholes. That’s especially true when people equate the Internet with Facebook or Twitter.
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Good god. What kind of repressive backwater of ignoramuses would refuse to implement metrics?
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And here I thought Christians had a monopoly on claiming allegiance to, but not following the principal tenets of, a religion that preaches tolerance and proscribes violence. Illusion shattered.
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And we like to whine about how the ‘eternal September’ was bad…
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Slightly off topic but this explains why my friend in the Philippines can continue using FB to communicate when she runs out of data on her sim. Slam FB for bribing carriers, but otherwise she and many other people just barely getting by would be cut off completely.
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They are cut off completely…from the actual Internet. They can have fun in that walled Zuckerberg garden though. That’s all the Internet is now?
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It’s more Internet than nothing. From what I can see she doesn’t do much with FB other than use it to communicate with friends and family when she can’t afford to load her sim up. When she has data she uses the web and other messaging apps. But FB is there as a last resort for staying in contact with friends and family spread all over the world.
I do understand what you are saying. I’m sick of FB personally. But I also make a great salary and work in tech and am spoiled technologically. I can afford to be picky. My friend and her family get by on a few hundred dollars a month. Their elderly parents live in other cities and have been hospitalized multiple times this past year. The family was able to mobilize each time through online communication to get the parent the help they needed.
So yeah, FB is self serving in what they are doing but as a side effect real people are able to keep sometimes vital lines of communication open. There is a long list of shitty things FB does, free acess in poor countries I’d put pretty low on that list.
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Gasoline+bonfire=?
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While it’s even more appalling for Buddhists to behave that way, you should also go look at what uber-tolerant Hinduism has been doing in India, between Modi’s demagoguery and the riots against Christians and Muslims in many parts of India. (And yes, there’s lots of colonial and conquest history involved, and sometimes the Muslims start the riots, but Modi’s most noted for not managing riots started by Hindus that killed a bunch of non-Hindus.)
I don’t think the Jains have attacked anybody recently, at least…
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This is a silly argument. The mechanism of with which group political violence spreads will always be adapting to human ecosystems. Anything that spreads information makes it possible. Before
Now we know the internet will be manipulated quite easily.
Trump has shown if America can be so easily manipulated, then every authoritarian state and tin pot dictator - or just similar bad actors both within and without Democracies will be rushing to control events and people suing it as well.
“What does facebook have to do with it” Well, it is a new method beyond the old ways of print, radio, tv, & word of mouth to engage a population in political violence. And it is very effective!
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While there may be a kernel of truth here, it’s a blatant clickbait headline…clearly no one can say what 50 million people are all up to. I mean hell, if we’re being honest, if even one one hundredth that number of people serious wanted to erase the tiny minority of Muslims in that country, they could do it in an afternoon. It’s like writing a headline purporting the entire population of NYC all had one opinion about something. (Other than “Fuck Chicago.”) I dig you, BB, but sometimes your extreme left wingy-ness is absolutely as bad as the right. For example, there are roughly 10 million LGBT people in America. Now imagine a headline on Fox News (or anywhere else) that said “all gays support the death penalty!” because you read on some random blog of a gay man that he supported it…well, this story does that, x5. Extreme -not to mention inaccurate- points of view like this add nothing constructive and only serve to divide people, and reinforce the already insane biases people have of people that disagree with them. Pump the brakes on this shit, BoingBoing, you’re not helping.
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This is quite possibly what the Burmese military wants people to think.
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I find all this hard to comprehend, having spent over a month there in 2004. At that time - internet access was restricted to to the major cities at, for locals, incredibly expensive rates. ISP performance was (at best) dial-up: I still remember counting the minutes! as my yahoo mail page loaded vertically on a dirty CRT in the government telco building, which likely once house switchboard operations right out of 1950.
Now, only 12 years later, we have this. The cultural disturbance of going from basically no internet/social media to all-pervasive is surely something someone should be studying here.
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According to Wikipedia, the population of Myanmar is 51 million. If 50 million of those can get Facebook, either a) there are no poor people or children there, or b) hyperbole.
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