The Politics of Erasure: How Digital Hate Speech Contributed to the Dehumanization of the Rohingya

Deskripsi

This podcast explores the profound impact that online hate speech had on the dehumanization of the Rohingya in Myanmar. This process has reinforced existing conditions of marginalization and persecution, contributing to the Rohingya becoming the largest stateless population in the world. By positioning online hate speech as a part of decades of dehumanizing rhetoric against the Rohingya, and by building on Hannah Arendt’s insights that the loss of citizenship means the loss of “the right to have rights,” we show how the legal erasure and dehumanization campaigns against the Rohingya went hand in hand in denying them of recognition, rights, and protection both within Myanmar and on the global stage. While social media platforms played a role in raising public awareness and bringing the Rohingya’s case to international attention, we argue that Facebook was actively complicit in silencing the Rohingya voices. Facebook reinforced the spread of disinformation and hate speech that portrayed the Rohingya as threats and unworthy of rights through the algorithmic incentives it provided and its community design. Through this lens, the podcast looks at how digital platforms can turn legal erasure into real life tragedies, showing how online systems can reproduce and worsen the patterns of exclusion. To achieve this, the podcast adopts a dialogue-driven approach involving a group of students, making the conversation dynamic, easy to follow, and accessible. Within the dialogue, excerpts from an interview conducted with Noor Azizah, a Rohingya activist and the Co-Executive Director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, are incorporated. Her testimony brings her personal experience as a refugee to the discussion, linking abstract concepts such as statelessness, dehumanization, and digital hate speech to real-life consequences of fear, violence, displacement and, most importantly, resistance. Ultimately, the podcast examines how the situation of the Rohingya in Myanmar is not only a political and humanitarian crisi