Hate Speech Against Muslims, Rohingya, and Women Surged in 2025 as Military-Backed Nationalists Escalated Online Campaigns

London, 30 April 2026 – Online hate speech targeting Muslims, Rohingya, and women intensified across Myanmar’s social media landscape in 2025, fueled by military-backed nationalist networks and amplified by platforms with weak enforcement, the Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) said today. A new report by BHRN documents 943 instances of hate speech recorded on Telegram, Facebook, and TikTok over the course of the year, finding no sustained decline in prevalence and a marked escalation in the severity and reach of content targeting ethnic and religious minorities.

“In 2025, BHRN documented 943 cases of hate speech targeting Muslims, Rohingya, and women in Myanmar,” said Kyaw Win, Executive Director of the Burma Human Rights Network. “Identifiable actors are running coordinated campaigns on Telegram, TikTok, and Facebook, and the platforms are doing almost nothing to stop them. The international community watched hate speech enable genocide in Myanmar in 2017. Governments serious about preventing atrocity crimes in Myanmar need to treat platform accountability as part of that agenda.”

Telegram hosted the largest share of documented hate speech. The platform’s channel-based system allows content to reach mass audiences simultaneously, and its enforcement of hate speech policies is negligible. TikTok saw a steady rise in documented hate speech compared to 2024. The Myanmar military junta’s internet restrictions and its criminalisation of VPN use under telecommunications law have driven more users to platforms accessible without circumvention tools, and hate speech has followed. Facebook continued to host anti-minority content throughout the year despite maintaining stricter community standards than the other two platforms.

Muslims and Rohingya were the most frequently targeted groups. Content consistently portrayed them as disloyal, illegal, or as existential threats to Buddhist Myanmar. Dehumanising language accounted for more than 70 percent of cases targeting religious minorities, with slurs including “kalar,” “Bengali terrorist,” and “illegal Bengali” appearing across all three platforms. The report documents a coordinated campaign by nationalist extremists, including named individuals and organisations, against the allocation of religious land grants to Muslim communities in Naypyidaw, generating sustained Islamophobic content both online and offline.

Women actively participating in resistance movements, journalism, and humanitarian work also faced a rising volume of gender-based hate speech. Content routinely portrayed women in public life as sex workers or as sexually exploited by male colleagues, designed to discredit and silence rather than engage with their political positions. The 2025 findings show an increase compared to 2024, consistent with research by the Centre for Information Resilience documenting systematic online abuse of women in Myanmar since the 2021 coup.

The report identifies a pattern of cross-platform content migration, in which hate speech originating on Telegram was reformatted into video and redistributed on TikTok, significantly increasing the resilience and reach of harmful content. International events, including developments at the International Court of Justice and the conflict in Palestine, were used to amplify hate speech targeting Muslim and Rohingya communities in Myanmar. The sham 2025 elections, in which candidates affiliated with extremist nationalist movements secured victories, have raised further concerns about the institutional entrenchment of exclusionary narratives.

“Since the 2021 coup, the military’s internet restrictions and criminalisation of VPN use have driven millions of people in Myanmar onto Telegram and TikTok. BHRN’s monitoring shows both platforms now host sustained campaigns of hate speech targeting Muslims, Rohingya, and women at scale, with almost no enforcement. Telegram and TikTok need to act, and governments that claim to care about accountability in Myanmar need to start demanding it,” said Kyaw Win, Executive Director of the Burma Human Rights Network.

BHRN calls on Telegram and TikTok to implement and enforce clear policies removing hate speech content and limiting its spread. BHRN further calls on civil society organisations to strengthen coordinated counter-speech efforts and on international stakeholders to support digital literacy initiatives in Myanmar.

Media Contact
Kyaw Win, Executive Director
Burma Human Rights Network
kyawwin@bhrn.org.uk
www.bhrn.org.uk

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Download the report Digital Hate – Annual Hate Speech Report Jan-Dec 2025