Next, we worked to ensure that our classifiers for hate speech and other policy-violating content weren’t going to trip over Zawgyi content and began work on integrating font converters to improve the content experience on Unicode devices. Last year, to support Myanmar’s transition to Unicode, we removed Zawgyi as an interface language option for new Facebook users.
The lack of standardization around Unicode makes automation and proactive detection of violating content harder, it can weaken account security, it makes reporting potentially harmful content on Facebook less efficient, and it means less support for languages in Myanmar beyond Burmese. This is a problem for apps like Facebook and Messenger because posts, messages, and comments written in one encoding are not readable in another. It makes communication on digital platforms difficult, as content written in Unicode appears garbled to Zawgyi users and vice versa. This lack of a single standard has resulted in technical challenges for many companies that provide mobile apps and services in Myanmar. Instead, Zawgyi is the dominant typeface used to encode Burmese language characters. Myanmar is currently the only country in the world with a significant online presence that hasn’t standardized on Unicode, the international text encoding standard.
