How Burmese People React on the Internet after the Military Coup

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar people were shocked and outraged as the Myanmar military staged a coup and detained Aung San Suu Kyi, the current prime minister. The military even cut off people’s access to Internet and intervene with television signals for part of the day.

As of now, the military has responded violently to demonstrations against its actions, resulting in numbers of casualties. Burmese people are now actively waging social media campaigns against the military and seeking international assistance.

Twitter is one of the main platforms where Myanmar people are usually active. All of the top 10 hashtags contain “Myanmar” are in relation to recent political movement in Myanmar, with the fisrt place being “#Myanmar”, followed by the second “#whatshappninginmyanmar”.

Along with the word “Myanmar,” the 10 most mentioned Twitter user names are shown below.

It’s not difficult to spot that some users seemingly unrelated to Myanmar’s political topics also appeared on the list. At the top of the list is @BookingHoldings，the official account of an online travel booking company. It had been mentioned most because customers in Myanmar asked its management to delist the hotel Azura Beach Resort, owned by the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing’s son.

Four of them are senior members from human rights groups and journalist who covers global affairs, including @SchranerBurgen1, Special Envoy of Secretary-General for Myanmar, @RapporteurUn, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, @freya_cole, BBC reporter, and @KenRoth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

The other four are human rights group — the United Nations(@UN), the United Nations Human Rights Council(@UN_HRC), the United Nations Human Rights Office(@UNHumanRights), and NGO of Human Rights Watch(@hrw).

You might be curious why Chinese mobile phone brand @Huawei is on the list, that’s because the Myanmar Military had deployed 335 Huawei surveillance cameras in the capital, which can automatically scan faces and license plates, to identify their “wanted criminals”.

On Youtube platform, the most popular channels for watching Myanmar-related videos, ranked by total views, are respectively Wanderer Nirvana, BBC News, AI Jazeera English, DW News, Sky News and WION. Among them, only Wanderer Nirvana is not a news media.