Many of Aung Py Thu’s TikTok videos look innocuous, showing him dancing or enjoying a meal.
But in a clip that was viewed 4m times before being taken down this week, the young Myanmar soldier brandishes his rifle and ammunition, in a clear warning to anyone protesting against the country’s coup in February.
After Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were blocked on the orders of the military, young soldiers like Aung have started posting more frequently to TikTok, which remains accessible in Myanmar.
Other videos show soldiers boasting about the capacity of their automatic rifles and pointing them at the camera, as well as doing the dances for which TikTok has become popular.
“The threats in the videos are the same as the threats heard in the streets” said Oliver Spencer, an adviser to non-governmental organisation Free Expression Myanmar. “They are not empty threats, because the use of live ammunition is increasing daily.”
Spencer said that there were echoes of the criticism that Facebook received in 2018, when the government carried out “clearance operations” against Rohingya Muslims. At the time, Myanmar civil society groups accused Facebook of “being used to incite real harm” following riots targeting minority Muslims.
TikTok said it has been removing the videos as they find them, and that it is “aggressively monitoring to remove any such content that violates our guidelines”.
This month, Facebook announced that military accounts would be banned from both Facebook and Instagram. “Events since the February 1 coup, including deadly violence, have precipitated a need for this ban,” said Rafael Frankel, Apac Emerging Countries director of policy. “We believe the risks of allowing the Tatmadaw [armed forces] on Facebook and Instagram are too great.”
Spencer said that increased moderation on Facebook was one of the reasons that soldiers had used TikTok, as well as its ability to reach young protesters.
But there are differences in how the platforms are being used. On Facebook, much of the pro-government messaging came from official military channels, while the soldiers on TikTok appear to be younger without clear links to more senior members.
TikTok has increasingly become an avenue for political speech. In the US, political hype houses, collectives of social media influencers, pushed messages supporting Donald Trump or Joe Biden. During the clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian and Azeri users used the app to promote their country’s narratives abroad.
Protesters in Myanmar are also using the app to both draw attention to and document the military’s actions to the wider world. Videos with the hashtag #savemyanmar have close to 800m views.