Rohingya diaspora online: Mapping the spaces of visibility,resistance and transnational identity on social media

Introduction

If there were no social media, then no one would know about the Rohingya crisis . . . We are Rohingya. Myanmar is our country. We want our citizenship in Myanmar, we want our homes and land back. (Mariam, Rohingya female participant, Brisbane)

Since the enactment of the 1982 Citizenship Act by the Burmese government, ¹ the Rohingya ethnic community has become ‘stateless’ and has been going through ethnic cleansing in their ancestral homeland, Myanmar. Despite being one of the ethnic minority groups in Myanmar, who live around a thousand years by generations; the legacy of colonial rule, fragile political system, incursions by the Military, and its religious affiliation with the neighbouring country Bangladesh, have all contributed to ruptures in identity over what it defines to be a Rohingya today (see Ibrahim, 2016; Leider, 2018; Uddin, 2020). Therefore, identity remains the core aspect of the Rohingya crisis in the development of diaspora in the context of suffering and traumatic experiences of genocide (Farzana, 2017; Leider, 2018).

Rohingya community members and rights activists have been campaigning for identity and citizenship rights in Myanmar for long decade (Aziz, 2021). The opening quote of Mariam illustrates the significance of new media technologies that provide a ‘lifeline’ for Rohingya survival, settlement and identity formation. There is a handful of studies have examined the Rohingya community’s digital media use, such as polymedia and transnational family care (Aziz, 2022b; Nisa, 2019), transnational digital connectivity (Aziz, 2022a), settlement in the refugee camps (Hussain and Lee, 2021), a nation building project (Abraham and Jaehn, 2019) and public engagement on Twitter (Al-Rawi, 2019). However, to date, no significant study highlights how they construct their identity and maintain diaspora in a way that articulates their voices of resistance and transnational digital engagement for justice and citizenship rights.

This article aims to examine how the Rohingya diaspora activists maintain and construct identity narratives that articulate their citizenship rights in transnational spaces (Levitt and Schiller, 2004) using new media technologies. This article thus seeks to fill gaps in the literature by addressing the overarching question: In what ways do the Rohingya diaspora activists utilise social media in constructing and maintaining transnational identities as a form of resistance and activism? The findings explore the nature of diasporic advocacy engagement, mediated visibility on social media (e.g. political activism in Brisbane), and diasporic media production that enabled their representation and identity narratives to contest Myanmar governments’ spread of hate speech and genocidal propaganda (Lee, 2019). In addition, the article illustrates how online identities are formed and evolved demanding for their citizenship rights and justice and longing for home(land). This study contributes to the emerging scholarship on digital media use in political imagination and identity construction online by forcibly displaced and ethnic minority communities. Overall, while the case of Rohingya refugees and diaspora activists is severely understudied, this study advances scholarship about how communities at the margins – non-Western, global south contexts – offer crucial insights to acknowledge and de-universalise Western centric understandings of digital media practices.

The Rohingya genocide and Facebook

During the Rohingya genocide in 2017, ² Facebook was used by the Burmese military and the Buddhist nationalists to spread hatred against the Rohingya community. At the same time, Facebook accounts of some Rohingya activists and pro-Rohingya content from Facebook were systematically deleted or disabled (BBC, 2017). A Reuters’ (2018) special report, ‘Hatebook: Inside Facebook’s Myanmar operation’ exposes more than 1000 samples, including posts, comments and images to incite violence and racial hatred against Rohingya Muslims on Facebook during the genocide in 2017. Facebook’s disturbing role reflects and acts as conduit for the ‘dark side’ of the Internet (Morozov, 2012), propagating genocidal rhetoric (Reuters, 2018) in Myanmar that intensified the Rohingya crisis.

Human rights activists accused Facebook of inciting offline violence through spreading hatred and nationalist propaganda online against the Rohingya community. Facebook faces accusations of failure to detect hate speech and anti-Rohingya rhetoric on its platform. After extreme pressure from rights groups, Facebook deleted a number of military officials’ and Buddhists monks’ Facebook accounts. The company stated: ‘today, we removed 425 Facebook Pages, 17 Facebook Groups, 135 Facebook accounts and 15 Instagram accounts in Myanmar for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on Facebook’ (Facebook, 2018). However, the US court ordered the Facebook to release all deleted anti-Rohingya content records for a genocide case filed by The Gambia government, which is trying to sue Myanmar’s military government at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague (Strangio, 2021).

In this context, in 2021, the Rohingya members in the United Kingdom and the United States sued Facebook for £150bn over the Myanmar genocide, accusing the platform of failing to prevent the incitement of the bloody campaign of genocide in Rakhine state in Myanmar. The Rohingya activists argued that Facebook’s algorithms amplified genocidal incitement through inflammatory posts and facilitated anti-Rohingya Buddhist nationalist propaganda that proves the Facebook’s negligence in combatting hate speech and misinformation (Milmo, 2021). While the Facebook authority admitted their failure to moderate hate speech that incited the ethnic violence, the legal case is ongoing and remains an example to keep social media platforms accountable.

Furthermore, the Rohingya crisis has continued to evolve throughout the conducting this study. Particularly, The Gambia’s move in 2019 to sue the Myanmar military for the ‘Rohingya genocide’ at the ICJ in the Netherlands has significantly impacted the entire Rohingya diaspora. The application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known as The Gambia v. Myanmar) at ICJ has given a sense of hope and aspiration for justice. In addition, recently the US administration recognised the ‘Rohingya genocide’ after a 5-year independent investigation that concluded that the massive killings, burning of villages and rape resulted in genocide (Jakes, 2022). These recent developments around the Rohingya crisis show the significance and relevance of this study.

Following this introduction, this article, first, reviews literature on identity politics and activism online. Then, it outlines the data collection process and ethical considerations. Next, the article presents findings and analysis of overlapping themes of diaspora and identity negotiation, including (1) the construction of the Rohingya diaspora through a social connection of imagined communities and global diasporic advocacy networks and (2) negotiating transnational identity through digitally mediated visibility such as political activism and diasporic, ethnic media production. Finally, the article concludes by outlining key findings and future directions and implications of these findings.

Digital diaspora: Identity, politics and new media

The emerging scholarship of digital migration studies (Leurs and Smets, 2018), digital media and Internet studies within transnationalism and diaspora contexts (Georgiou, 2006; Karim and Al-Rawi, 2018; Smets et al., 2019) has made significant strides in understanding migration and the everyday media practices (Ponzanesi and Leurs, 2022). Diasporic networks are transformed and intertwined with shifting digital communication landscapes, as illustrated by Anderson’s concept of nations as ‘imagined political communities’. He argues that diasporas are constructed and conceptualised as ‘imagined communities’ because ‘the members of even the smallest nation [diaspora] will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 2006: 224). Similarly, Appadurai’s (1990: 328) idea of ‘scapes’ provides a framework of ‘global cultural flows’, which has been instrumental in understanding media technologies and migration, and how modern relationships are imagined across borders. Appadurai (1996: 4) states that ‘electronic media provide resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project [. . .] with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities’. Both Appadurai and Anderson focus a link between the media, nationhood and geographic (dis)location as well as groups of individuals who share the same ideas and imaginings. In addition, the idea of transnationalism and ‘diasporic consciousness’ by Vertovec (2000) has further expanded these two concepts that refer to identity negotiation and a sense of connection across the displaced diasporic communities. As Karim (2003: 9) writes, diasporas ‘are seeking ways of “reterritorializing” and “re-embedding” their identities in other imaginings of space’.

Earlier studies show how digital technologies help diaspora and marginalised communities to express their marginalised voice in cyberspace such as blogs (Mitra, 2001; Mitra and Watts, 2002). In their investigation of South Asian bloggers, R. Mitra and Gajjala (2008) examine the self-expression of blog communities that may not be available offline and how these communities shape bloggers’ sexual orientations and performance and identity. Brinkerhoff’s (2009: 2) Digital Diasporas offers a conceptual model of ‘digital diasporas’, highlighting identity as a ‘sense of self that is neither wholly of the homeland nor exclusively reflective of the host land’. Major scholarship (Alonso and Oiarzabal, 2010; Brinkerhoff, 2009; Georgiou, 2006, 2013; Trandafoiu, 2013; Vertovec, 2004) emphasises how diaspora communities and forced migrants negotiate collective identity across local and transnational diasporic networks through digital technologies. Similarly, emerging scholarship highlights how digital media have transformed online mediations of diasporic communities and refugees for identity formation and belonging in transnational spaces (Christensen, 2012; Wilding, 2012). Similar studies among Uighurs (NurMuhammad et al., 2016), Palestinian (Aouragh, 2011), Eritrian (Bernal, 2014) and Roma (Hatef, 2022) show the role of Internet and social media platforms for identity construction. Victoria Bernal’s (2014, 2020) work on Eritrean politics and digital media shows the extraterritorial aspect of diasporic identity politics and the ‘dynamics of cyberspatiality’. Bernal (2020: 4) argues, the technologies are crucial to the formation of ‘new public spheres, forms of protest, social groupings, and spaces of imagination’. Therefore, new media and communication studies have been predominantly important in advancing ideas about mediated connections of diasporas with their homeland (Diminescu, 2008; Karim, 2003; Retis and Tsagarousianou, 2019; Smets et al., 2019).

However, while digital technologies are increasingly emerging as a crucial tool for advocating social justice and political reform, scholars warn that social media platforms facilitate repressive regimes (Morozov, 2012; Tufekci, 2014). Recent scholarship explores the digitalisation of border control (Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2022) and constitutive power of digital infrastructures through ‘biometric assemblage’ (Madianou, 2019) such as blockchain, biometrics and artificial intelligence. Proposing the idea of ‘platformed racism’, Matamoros-Fernandez (2017: 933) argues that social media platforms may facilitate racist dynamics through algorithms and corporate policies. In her book, ‘Algorithms of Oppression’, Noble (2018) shows how search engines such as Google perpetuate racist and discriminatory practices though misrepresenting the marginalised communities. Dana Moss (2016) explores how authoritarian states deter dissent in the diaspora through networked and ‘transnational repression’ over the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. In this context, transnational diasporic activism by the forcibly displaced and minority communities (e.g. Rohingya), and their digitally mediated transnational protest (Cottle and Lester, 2011; Khazraee and Novak, 2018) require more nuanced and scholarly attention over the use of new media technologies and social media affordance as way of identity formation, expression and resistance to repressive power structures.

Methods and data

This article is based on in depth, semi structured interviews and social media scroll back interview data of 15 displaced Rohingya members and activists in Brisbane. Applying both interview methods, I explore their everyday digital and social media use for negotiating identity, belonging and integration. The social media scroll back interview, a visual method that is useful to explore the ‘historical digital traces, collected over years of social media use’ (Møller and Robards, 2019: 106). This method contributed to understanding the participants’ social media practices while they are ‘witnessing’ genocide and staying far away from their homeland. The interview questions were concerned with the main themes, which are related to the papers’ research questions; everyday social media practices and digital connectivity to maintain transnational diasporic networks for citizenship rights, justice and identity. Considering diversity in participants’ social backgrounds, the participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling.

After conducting the semi-structured interviews, eight participants were recruited for the social media scroll back interviews depending on their availability, community work and their active social media engagement. After some initial questions about their identity, interviews turned to the scroll back element. I used the participants’ own devices (e.g. smartphones, laptop) to access their social media accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). The participants were asked to scroll back through their profiles to find posts (e.g. image, text, video) that document or reflect on the Rohingya genocide, identity and citizenship. Whenever they found any post related to the themes, they approached me; I then used that post to continue further discussion for in-depth understanding of identity-related issues. In this stage, five participants were preferred to be interviewed online due to their privacy concerns over social media. Therefore, first, they shared screenshots of their social media posts by their choice, which were used later as prompts for further discussion considering the significance of shared post (such as images, videos) on social media platforms.

The participants ranged in age from 22 to 57 years old and interviews lasted 50–80 minutes. Furthermore, the participants were given flexibility in language depending on their convenience in response to my questions. Participants were allowed to switch to any language (such as from Rohingya to English and vice versa) while feeling any difficulties in expressing any events or experiences clearly. So, the ability to speak Bangla and Rohingya as well as English enabled me access to wider perspectives of participants. Before conducting the interviews, I made close relationships with the participants through multiple masjid visits during juma prayer (weekly congregation) and participation in multicultural events, which also helped me to build rapport and to connect with ‘hard to reach’ participants.

To ensure confidentiality, all participants have been de-identified, thus all names in this article have been substituted with pseudonyms, removing their age and status. In addition, any screenshot that includes participants in the study has been removed. Before conducting interviews, I assured them that I was aware of the evolving issues in Rakhine state, Myanmar and in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh or elsewhere and their experiences of statelessness and exclusion. All participants were informed about the purpose of the study and verbal/written informed consent was obtained prior to all interviews. Interviews were recorded only with the participants’ consent, and then translated/transcribed into English. All collected data, including screenshots were stored online data storage with a protective security code as per ethical guidelines of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The data from both interviews and the visual materials were thematically categorised with a reference to participants’ narratives of resistance, digital engagement and negotiating identities through social media platforms in the context of traumatic experiences of pain and forced migration. The transcripts of the interviews and visualities such as images of texts/social media posts were thematically analysed (Braun and Clarke, 2006) with an iterative combination of multiple coding cycles (Saldaña, 2016). With this, I did a close, simultaneous reading of both interview transcriptions and images to ensure the triangulation of the various ‘threads’ of collected data (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006). In addition, during the data analysis, I regularly observed the Rohingya activism online as well as the media reports to get a better idea about their social media engagement and updated information about the Rohingya crisis. With this, I considered the ways [online] spaces (Massey, 2005) were socially negotiated, and how these were constructed and shaped by mediated visibilities and identities online.

In the following section, I present the findings and analysis that combine interrelated aspects of the construction of the Rohingya diaspora and provide a nuanced understanding of digital resistance and transnational engagement for identity formation.

Constructing the Rohingya diaspora

Towards the imagined communities of resistance

The Rohingya community leaders and social media activists in Australia are actively involved in organising social and cultural events in a demonstration against injustice in Rakhine. For example, Kashem, a Rohingya community activist in Brisbane explained that Rohingya diaspora activists have been engaging in digital transnational communication through social media to enable their voices to be heard at the global level. He explained why he shared an image (see Figures 1 & 4) on Facebook:

I shared the images from my Rohingya friend’s Facebook page to show how Rohingya people have been killed by the Burmese military. So, it is important to inform the global audience, like the Australian government to know the atrocity and the state [Myanmar] sponsored terrorism. I think people are too sympathetic to the Rohingya crisis, but most people don’t know about this crisis. So, the Rohingya community needs to raise their voice and concern over social media to reach a broader audience.

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Figure 1.

Amnesty International Club in Australia organised an event to address the Rohingya issue.

Kashem’s quote shows that social media may play a potential role into bridging the gap in communicating and reaching global audiences and making them part of the ‘imagined community’. He also often engages with human rights forums such as Amnesty International, Refugee Council of Australia to address the Rohingya crisis (see Figure 1).

Similarly, Rahman, another Rohingya activist in Brisbane highlighted the role of social media in drawing policymakers’ and governments’ attention to accept more Rohingya refugees, especially those who often arrive by boat and seek asylum status:

[. . .] Social media is the main platform to show the severity of the Rohingya crisis. So that many countries including Australia have shown their genuine interest to accept the Rohingya refugees, especially those who came by boat and seeking asylum. In many countries, Rohingya are struggling to get asylum. So, it is our duty to make the governments (of host countries) understand our crisis.

The quote above shows the significance of social media displaying their suffering and statelessness. It shows the aspirations for ‘being visible’ while online visibility and social connection may provide better opportunities for them in many host countries, especially Australia. In this way, social media affordances may bring the Rohingya members together enabling them to establish a network with governmental organisations and communities at both local and transnational levels to support the Rohingya cause. However, reaching out to transnational audiences and operating systematic political engagement remain challenging for the Rohingya community, while they are scattered and dispersed across many countries:

Being an activist, I would love to build connections with other people so that they can help me to raise awareness. Being an activist, I also need to know the opportunities to raise my voice actively. And that comes with having social connections, and through that, people can pass on to the activists in the group in the community and say, alright, this opportunity has come. Let’s go ahead! So, one of the challenges that I have often faced is getting the opportunities to raise my voice [emphasis added]. Because it’s limited to what I can do on my own, while strong sources of transnational connections are required to raise my voice and awareness of the Rohingya crisis. (Harris, Brisbane)

Harris’ narratives echo other participants’ desire for a bonding of transnational connection, strengthening their collective identity, weak/strong ties, old/new connections, solidarities and resistances. It reflects Anderson’s (2006) concept of ‘imagined communities’ and Hall’s (1990) insights into diaspora and cultural identity formation. Hall (1990: 236) states that diasporic identities ‘are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’. In addition, the narratives of the Rohingya participants explicitly show the essentials of digital connectivity with community members and others in the ‘imagined audience’ (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). They are imagined in the sense that they are part of ‘potential’ connections and transnational solidarity in (re)constructing their diasporic identity. Aouragh’s (2011) study shows how the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and ‘shaped’ through the mediated space of the Internet. The construction of diaspora goes beyond borders involving digital interaction between diaspora communities, home and host countries. In this context, digital technologies have allowed the Rohingya displaced people to form a community and revive their ‘diasporic imaginaries’ (Georgiou, 2006, 2019).

The Rohingya diaspora’s enthusiasm for being socially and digitally connected embodies the idea of ‘digital togetherness’, which Marino (2015: 6) describes as ‘a specific sense of belonging and identity that is based on sharing personal and private experiences, such as being online’. Social media provides a virtual space for community building and acts as resistance with a sense of unity and strength, allowing people in a diaspora to maintain ‘digital belonging’ that intersects social cohesion and the culture of connectivity (Marlowe et al., 2017). In other words, social media connects different platforms and leads to the emerging digital diasporic networks in transnational spaces (Levitt and Schiller, 2004) through digital interactions and representation. With this, the following section specifically focuses on diasporic advocacy networks on social media platforms in maintaining the Rohingya diaspora over time.

Identity formation online: visibility and resistance

Diasporic media production: the voices of resistance online

As discussed earlier, during the Rohingya genocide in 2017, the Myanmar military government restricted journalists’ access to Rakhine State while the Burmese military and Buddhist nationalists used social media platforms like Facebook to spread hatred against the Rohingya community, resulted in ‘Rohingya genocide’ and subsequent massive influx to Bangladesh. In this context, responding to the Burmese government propaganda and hatred on Facebook, many web-based and social media based Rohingya news platforms have emerged in recent years (see Figure 2). Some prominent Rohingya ethnic media platforms are Rohingya Vision, Arakan Times, The Rohingya Post, Rohingya Today, Rohingya Blogger, Rohang TV, Rohingya National News and Voice of Rohingya.

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Figure 2.

Some prominent Rohingya ethnic media platforms and diasporic advocacy networks on Facebook.

The emergence of ethnic and diasporic media production and social media-based advocacy networks (see Figure 2) shows how resistance and subversion can occur in relation to the modes and systems of power, xenophobic and anti-Rohingya narratives of the Myanmar government. For example, R Vision TV, a TV and news network are available on different platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Like R Vision, The Arakan Times has been popular among the Rohingya community with 315,000 and 206,000 subscribers on YouTube, respectively. Both media channels cover Rohingya news, ethnic culture, Rohingya documentaries, religious and educational programmes and community activities in multiple languages, including English, Burmese and Rohingya. In addition to airing news programmes about Rohingya-related issues, the Rohingya channels cover other contemporary global issues, including conflicts in the Middle East and refugee issues in Europe. These news channels usually depend on sources who are ‘on the ground’ in Rakhine State, Myanmar and in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh. To ensure security, the channels keep sources’ identities secret and anonymous. Such media productions (like R Vision, Zita TV, the Rohingya Post and the Arakan Times) play a crucial role in access to information by offering ‘positive and creative processes of participation and communion’ showcasing ‘experiences of exclusion, marginalisation’ in a host country or home country (Georgiou, 2013: 86). Matar and Dakhlallah (2006) show how the Hizbullah-backed satellite television station Al Manar becomes the effective voice of the Shias in Lebanon, connecting their imagined communities. As such, the strength of ethnic media production and diasporic media activism are inevitable, particularly, within the Rohingya diaspora as they play a unique role in expressing critical opinions on political and socio-economic issues as well as mediating identity narratives and cultural practices through diasporic media (Ogunyemi, 2018). For example, the Arakan Times sets its mission ‘to revive the culture and spirit of the Rohingyas throughout the world via the new media channels and social networking’. ³

The rapid emergence of Rohingya ethnic media and diasporic media activism on different digital platforms (such as YouTube) continue to provide their stories of sufferings as well as resilience and resistance. In this way, diasporic media facilitates the Rohingya diaspora to find their voices in their language, providing opportunities for representation and expression. At the same time, it connects the global audiences and challenges dominant Burmese nationalist discourse, which portrays the Rohingya as ‘illegal migrants’ and a threat to Myanmar.

Social media as a site for political activism and space of visibility

It is evident that diasporic media facilitates developing strategies and resistances, raising the ‘voice’ of the ‘voiceless’ Rohingya community globally. The Rohingya diaspora activists are determined to voice their growing concerns about genocide in Myanmar and (in)security in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps, Bangladesh (see Aziz,2021; 2022b). Social media platforms facilitate cultural events and discussions and public protests over genocide in Myanmar, which not only connect them with their country of origin but also construct their identity in transnational space. Specifically, the political expression of the Rohingya diaspora on social media platforms has been intensively visible since the genocide on 25 August 2017, during The Gambia’s case against Myanmar at the ICJ in 2019 (HRW, 2022) and the recent US declaration of genocide against Rohingya in Myanmar. The Rohingya diaspora across Australia and beyond showed their utmost support, welcoming The Gambia’s initiative at the ICJ. The live streaming of the protest on Facebook was shared intensively with other diasporic networks, gaining 33,000 views and 236 comment. ⁴ The participants urged the Australian government to support by the Rohingya, asserting, ‘Australia, take a role . . . Stop genocide in Myanmar, right now’.

A participant from Brisbane shared an image (see Figure 3) that shows a public protest live streamed on Facebook in which the participants from the Australian government, such as local council, senate and parliament members, human rights activists from Amnesty International participated to show solidarity with the Rohingya diaspora. The public observation of the ‘Rohingya Genocide Day’ as a collective commemoration provides a crucial aspect in the (re)shaping of the self-representation of communities and the power of identity (Castells, 2010). At the same time, the participants from non-Rohingya communities demonstrate the aspect of the ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor, 1995) in building a relationship of trust and solidarity. Stuart Hall (1990: 153) argues that ‘identity is formed at the unstable point where the stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history’. Remembrance of genocide incorporates the Rohingya’s imagination of traumatic past and their ‘homeland’ while mediated commemoration exemplifies the role of social media in these processes of transnational identity negotiation. In addition, I focus on the (mediated) visibility of the protest in the King George Square in Brisbane, being ‘visible’ in an urban space and city centre that attracts the attention of citizens, visitors and politicians (see Figure 3). At the same time, being on live broadcast and visibly seen in mediated spaces through different social media platforms create an increasingly ‘fragmented and multilayered communications environment’ as well as a strategic positioning of transnational protest and activism (Cottle and Lester, 2011).

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Figure 3.

Observing Genocide Remembrance Day in Brisbane.

Similarly, some participants shared images of the ‘Rohingya genocide 2017’ that reflect the suffering and forcible displacement and the subsequent massive influx to Bangladesh. Kashem shared images on his Facebook page (see Figure 4) calling the situation ‘catastrophic and traumatic’. This approach strongly aligns with Chouliaraki’s (2021: 16) recent study on the victimhood as an ‘affective politics of vulnerability’ in a communicative context. The images in Figure 4 show the victimhood of displaced Rohingya people as a form of visual politics, in which mediated visibility reinforces the ‘transnational being’ and ‘transnational belonging’ (Levitt and Schiller, 2004) by producing collective struggle for citizenship, transnational solidarity of suffering and statelessness on social media.

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Figure 4.

Images reflecting the plight of females, children and elderly family members as ‘collective suffering’ during the massive August 2017 influx of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh.

Also, during the interviews, some participants showed their anxiety and concern regarding the Australian policy towards refugees and criticised the government’s ‘indifference’ towards the Rohingya crisis. Some participants described the current Australian’ asylum policy as ‘discriminatory’ and ‘cruel’ and criticised the Australian foreign policy as a ‘double standard’. They said the policy ‘fails to restrict’ the relationship with the Burmese military government. Such claims may also be relevant to recent ‘selective compassion’ towards the Ukrainian refugees who are welcomed with open arms by many European and Western countries (Sajjad, 2022), while (being not an exception) Australia’s response to people fleeing other war-torn countries including the Rohingya and others (e.g., Syria, Afghanistan), remains discriminatory and biased. For example, Rahman, a Rohingya community activist in Brisbane shared the image of protest in Sydney (see Figure 5), which was live streamed on Facebook and shared on other social media platforms and stated:

The world knows her (Aung San Suu Kyi) as the icon of democracy. But she supported the military government to suppress the Rohingya. She never pronounced the word ‘Rohingya’ at any global forum. She is selfish and complicit [emphasis added]. So, a country like Australia, which is known as a peaceful and democratic country, should not allow her. Welcoming her to Australia is meant to justify or legalize her acts toward the Rohingya community in Myanmar.

Rahman’s narrative and image (see Figure 5) show the Rohingya community protesting the arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi in Australia to attend the ASEAN Summit in 2018, just a year after the Rohingya genocide in 2017. The Rohingya in Australia made a human chain and organized huge protests across major cities – including Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra – against Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit to Australia. This image of protest also reflects the Australians’ policy towards Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya, as the Rohingya activists claim. Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate in peace and known as a Myanmar democracy icon who ‘fell from grace’, has been criticised widely because of her lack of empathy towards the Rohingya and backing of the military that led to the Rohingya genocide (BBC, 2021).

However, while the Rohingya diaspora felt sad to see Aung San Suu Kyi’s ‘unexpected role’, they also showed their solidarity and support of fellow Burmese citizens and other ethnic minority groups against the military coup in Myanmar (see Figure 6), in which Aung San Suu Kyi was detained by the military after her party’s (NLD) landslide win in the 2020 election (Maizland, 2022). A Rohingya member in Brisbane said the ‘majority Rohingya admire her and support her political party because of her long struggle against the military government, but she did nothing for the Rohingya cause’.

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Figure 5.

A Facebook image of Rohingya community members’ protest against the arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi in Australia for the ASEAN Summit in 2018.

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Figure 6.

Twitter screenshot of a joint protest event of the Rohingya diaspora and other ethnic groups from Myanmar denouncing the military coup and demanding democracy and citizenship rights.

Overall, the findings demonstrate that social media platforms facilitate the displaced Rohingya member to reach new audiences globally. Social media affordances such as live streaming features have been used widely by refugee rights activists and political protesters in similar conditions. For example, Swedish refugee rights activist, Elin Ersson live-streamed her protest from an aeroplane against the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker. This provides an excellent illustration of media power that produces collective actions across the world against the European refugee policy (Khattab, 2020). Following the same techniques, the Rohingya diaspora often live-stream their protest and cultural events on social media exemplifying the political resistance and power to digitally mobilised voice and mediated visibility (see Figure 5). Social media’s digital innovation of live streaming feature that enabled the Rohingya protest to interact and share with thousands of social media users instantly. In this way, the affordance of visibility through social media helps them maintain spatial and temporal co-presence and self-presentation (Goffman, 1959) in a highly mediated transnational environment. These visual displays of social media platforms such as cover photos of Facebook profiles (see Figure 2) and utilising the social media affordances such as live streaming, sharing posts, images of protests and creating social and cultural events on Facebook provide ways to (re)imagine home(land) in mediated virtual space.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explored how social media platforms act as a means for the displaced Rohingya people’s voices and resistance, and facilitate their unique forms of diasporic agency and identity politics in digital environments. This study examined the Rohingya diaspora’s digital engagements and their mediated visibility through diasporic media transnational advocacy networks and political activism online. Considering the forced dispossession of the Rohingya Muslim minority from their homeland, I argue that digitally mediated visibility is a form of resistance as the Rohingya activists can control their own narratives and representations.

Looking through intersecting aspects and strategies of identity and diaspora maintenance, this article has offered a more nuanced understanding of the various forms of identity politics built over time and space. Such findings reflect the embeddedness of the Rohingya diaspora in compound and various social ‘fields’ (Levitt and Schiller, 2004). New media technologies have been critical for the Rohingya diaspora from organising public protests and social movements, disseminating information (re)sources and building communities to producing a sense of ‘home’, belonging and social connections. With this, I argue that the Rohingya communities utilised new media technologies while Internet connectivity has been central in facilitating the Rohingya identity and establishing diasporic and social networks in transnational spaces.

Further, the article explored how the Rohingya online simultaneously facilitated the construction of a Rohingya diaspora and how transnational identities are formed, evolved and mediated, longing for home(land), citizenship rights and justice. My analyses have explored the shifting media environments and communication technologies, diasporic news media (such as TV, news blogs) and social media platforms, which allow the Rohingya diaspora to engage with a constant and convenient environment for sharing information in transnational spaces beyond geographical boundaries against the background of statelessness. The analysis highlights the affordances of smartphones and social media in facilitating a unique combination of multiple communicative tools (Van Dijck, 2013) that show the ‘interconnections and re-mediations between different media platforms’ (Couldry, 2012: 16–19). In this way, the multiplicity of digital media practices can also be seen as repertoires of everyday resistance, which ‘is situated in a certain time, space and power relations, and it engages with different (types of) actors, techniques’ (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016: 418).

The findings of the study presented in this article are limited by its scope to the Rohingya activists in Brisbane. Further study can be carried out by gathering data considering different online and offline aspects with a combination of digital and computational methods (such as network analysis, issue mapping) to map the diasporic networks, transnational engagement and identity politics online. Despite the limitations, this study enhances our understanding of how new media technologies are employed to advance social justice and rights for marginalised communities, and the ways in which social media platforms provide transnational spaces for negotiating mediated visibilities and voices online.

Overall, this study offers an overview of digital cultures of resistance that intersect the relationship between the visual, cultural, spatial and (geo)political, in which transnational identities are negotiated and (re)constructed in a digital age. At the same time, it advances emerging scholarship about how marginalised and displaced communities utilise digital media in forging their own agency in bolstering diasporic ties, inclusion and social connection in the context of prolonged displacement and suffering.