2019 KGRI Working Papers

The cyberspace has provoked new questions concerning national identity. It has created a new sphere where people experience and express nationalism in various forms and degrees, but increasingly defensively and not in keeping with international norms. The Rohingya issue that has unfolded in Myanmar represents such case. The massive displacement of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Myanmar, has thus far evolved into an uncompromising controversy between the government of Myanmar and the international community. I argue that the key to understanding this controversy lies in the way social media frames the issue.

It is through social media platforms such as Facebook that news and comments expressing hostility toward the Rohingya—thus far unrecognized by the state—gain broad viewership. Frame analysis affords us a way of to understand how fake news or disinformation works. This paper focuses on the less attended frame, that is, how the increasingly defensive nationalistic social media in Myanmar frames the Rohingya issue.

Using cases from Myanmar, my paper aims to sketch out how fake news feeds popular antagonism against the Rohingya minority and the international media reporting on them, how conflicting framing works, and how Burmese social media shapes nationalism in the country.

In order to protect human dignity given the ever-growing power of computers and data aggregation, we must adopt a new philosophy and architecture for the governance of data. We step beyond the conventional assumption of human monopoly of intelligence and envision integrated man-machine agents that will emerge to safeguard personal data on a firm basis of trust. A new "cyber civilization" is dawning, in which humans live with machines in conviviality, and we must develop governance structures that address this reality. A few guiding principles for the design of the architecture are proposed.