Profiteers have flooded social media with fake news and bogus videos since a powerful earthquake devastated Myanmar last month, exploiting the chaos with clickbait that can reap tens of thousands in ad revenues, digital activists say.
Be it sensational images that go viral or fake rescue tales, the schemes prey on the heightened fears and appetite for news that follow any disaster or outbreak of war.
“People just have to assume there’s a lot of false information that circulates. They should be aware there are people making money off of false information,” said Darrell West, a senior technology researcher at the Brookings Institution think-tank.
The death toll from Myanmar’s March 28 quake has risen to more than 3,600, according to state media, with a further 5,000 injured and hundreds of people still missing.
The quake was the latest blow for the impoverished Southeast Asian country of 53 million, following a 2021 coup that returned the military to power and devastated its economy after a decade of development and tentative democracy.
Grassroots group Digital Insight Lab, which runs Facebook pages countering misinformation and hate speech in Myanmar, said it had seen viral posts claiming to show the devastation of the disaster even though the videos were shot in Syria and Malaysia, or created from scratch by artificial intelligence (AI).
“Many of these reports repurpose photos and videos from unrelated past incidents, while others leverage AI-generated content to fabricate false narratives,” said research officer Windy, who used a pseudonym for safety.
Misinformation and disinformation are common on social media following catastrophes, digital experts say, be it miscaptioned images, fake videos or false narratives about rescue efforts.
“When you have mis- and disinformation, it can escalate panic, you can delay your evacuation. It can undermine the trust that you have in emergency services. It can also be really distracting,” said Jeanette Elsworth, head of communications at the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).
After Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the United States last year, false rumours spread accusing the government of channelling federal disaster funds to illegal migrants.
When a massive quake hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing more than 51,000 people, fraudsters uploaded old videos of tsunamis in Japan and Greenland, claiming it was real-time footage from the new disaster zone.
“We have a Wild West now where virtually anything goes. There are very few laws regulating content online, and the tech companies aren’t doing very much to protect people,” West, of the Brookings Institution, told Context.
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When you have mis- and disinformation, it can escalate panic, you can delay your evacuation. It can undermine the trust that you have in emergency services. It can also be really distracting.
Jeanette Elsworth, head of communications, UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction
Misinformation pays
More than $20 billion was made in 2024 through advertising revenues shared between social platforms and content creators, according to tech policy group What To Fix.
Content creators use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to get a share of revenue from the ads displayed with their posts, said founder Victoire Rio, who has also worked in Myanmar researching misinformation.
She said the model incentivises creators to produce viral posts, even if they are false or AI-generated, because the more views and shares they attract, the more money they make.
Though it is difficult to calculate an exact figure, fraudsters have been able to earn tens of thousands of dollars during previous crises such as the 2021 Myanmar coup, Rio said.
A 2021 study by fact-checking firm NewsGuard and analytics company Comscore said misinformation websites reap US$2.6 billion from digital advertising each year.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, accounts for more than 60 per cent of the social advertising market and had over 3.1 million creator accounts in 2024, a 55 per cent increase on the previous year, according to What To Fix.
“In the current context in Myanmar, a vast volume of the disinformation you’re seeing circulate is financially motivated,” Rio said.
Meta said they remove posts that violate their policies, working with partners to debunk false claims and move such content down the feed “so fewer people see it.”
In January, Meta scrapped its US fact-checking programmes and shifted its approach to managing political content.
TikTok said it bans misleading and false content on its platform and proactively removed inaccurate posts after the Myanmar quake, directing users to credible sources.
It said it has trained moderators and fact-checking partners working in 50+ languages.
Rio said the lack of information coming out of Myanmar due to internet shutdowns was also fuelling misinformation.
“You have a huge community of people that are turning to Facebook from outside of Myanmar trying to find information. And those people are particularly vulnerable to misinformation because they are desperately looking for information,” Rio said.
Htaike Htaike Aung, director of the Myanmar Internet Project, which tracks the country’s internet blackouts, said the situation was putting lives at risk.
“Due to it’s clickbaity nature and how social media algorithms function, (fake posts) are often at the top of the newsfeed, which makes people having access to quality information more challenging,” said Aung.
“It’s hindering a lot of aid efforts. Access to information at this time is a life and death situation.”
Reducing risks
Eliška Pírková, senior policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now, said platforms should do more to head off misinformation instead of relying on community groups to report false content after it runs.
“Access to information is always a lifeline, and especially during times of crisis. So (platforms) have very heightened due diligence obligations,” she said.
“Local civil society organisations often have to step in and take the burden of flagging and escalating cases. These resources are already extremely scarce because they are dealing with the crisis on the ground.”
Governments have also been urged to step up.
While the European Union aims to rein in tech companies, the United States has ditched some protective guardrails to accelerate its dominance of the global market.
Either way, it will take more than Big Tech and government to tackle fake news, said UNDRR’s Elsworth, who urged religious leaders, civil society and local media to play their part, too.
“Everybody needs to get involved,” she said. “It’s … about empowering people at every level to do what they need to do.”
This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/.
