No longer the regime agent watching from across the street but the cell phone tracking you from your pocket. Who needs the Stasi when the regime has social media?
Indeed, the country could best be described as an “intelligence state”….
The dramatic increase in the use of mobile phones and the internet, for instance, allowed the authorities to use widespread digital surveillance to maintain social control. And in 2018, the president’s office formed a team of social media monitors, whose work some opponents have questioned. …
One youth activist described the chill this has caused: “It makes us censor ourselves. It creates fear in the youth community. We are still living in fear.”
Is Myanmar a glimpse of mankind’s future? Future historians will debate which Western export was most damaging. Colonialism, Marxism or mass surveillance.