As hate speech is a term that comes from emotion, there is a wide spectrum in defining it, not a specific one. BHRN, therefore, standardized the definition of hate speech for this report as follows. Hate speech in this report means aggressiveness and hatred against protected characteristics of a person or a group, blaming, discriminative expression, writing, gesture, or art expression of excoriation, or dehumanization.
It means attacking someone’s faith, language, gender, sexual orientation, origin, ethnicity, skin color, race, belief, citizenship, and physical appearance. The monitored hate speeches were categorized as (1) Criminalizing Hate Speech, (2) Abusive Hate Speech, (3) Dehumanizing Hate Speech, (4) Violence Inciting Hate Speech, (5) Threatening Hate Speech, and (6) Hate Speech that supports prejudicial actions inspired by hate speech.
BHRN has daily documented hate speech terms and usages found in the contents – based on the current political crisis - disseminated by the military’s propagative channels during the political and war tensions.
This report was written after monitoring both online and printed media which Junta and its supporters used to spread their hate speeches. BHRN has recorded a total of 8 hate speech posts from monitoring 3 Facebook groups and 13 Facebook accounts, a total of 63 hate speech posts from monitoring 24 Telegram channels, and 16 posts from 34 TikTok accounts. In the printed media, two newspapers and one journal were also monitored. A total of 87 hate speech cases were recorded during January of 2025. There are many limitations to conducting monitoring that can cover the entirety of Burmese social media, and there may be cases of hate speech that go unreported here.