ICTworks

Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have become tools of empowerment—but also engines of harm—for Indigenous youth.

A recent study “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” by Ishmam Bin Rof analyzes how young Jumma (Indigenous) people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh navigate digital life.  It draws on interviews and focus groups with 30 young users from 8 Indigenous communities to find both promise and peril.

Here’s a breakdown of key findings, framed around four pressing questions.

How does social media impact Indigenous youth?

Social media serves as a vital bridge between tradition and modernity. For many young Jumma users, platforms like Facebook and YouTube are digital archives and activist megaphones.

They use social media to preserve their endangered Indigenous culture by uploading traditional Chakma songs and sharing festival practices like the Marma “Water Festival”.

They also use social media to highlight injustice, like the viral resurgence of interest in Kalpana Chakma, a missing Indigenous activist, whose story gained visibility during Bangladesh’s Quota Reform Movement.

And it can strengthen their political voice. Social media allows them to build solidarity, especially during national moments of protest or celebration like International Indigenous Day.

These benefits come at a cost. The same platforms that empower also expose them to cultural misunderstandings. Posts about traditional clothing or festivals are often met with ridicule or moral judgment from majority Bengali users.

Young users face criticism from within their own communities for adopting elements of Bengali culture, such as wearing sarees during campus events. These misunderstandings are compounded when tourists and influencers depict CHT culture through exoticized or inaccurate lenses, exploiting it for clicks rather than understanding.

Where are unique vulnerabilities of Indigenous groups?

Indigenous users are not just marginalized offline—they’re digitally marginalized too. The vulnerabilities stem from three intersecting factors:

• Cultural Othering: Their distinct facial features, clothing, and language become markers of difference that attract online slurs like “ching chong,” often leading to real-world harassment.
• Geopolitical isolation: The CHT is not just remote—it’s historically associated with land dispossession and militarization. This makes open dialogue risky, as political posts can trigger state surveillance or threats from settler groups.
• Systemic invisibility: Platforms rarely understand, let alone design for, the specific needs of Indigenous users in the Global South. The result? Few tools for safety, self-expression, or cultural nuance.

As the report emphasizes, these are not abstract concerns. They are “lived vulnerabilities” rooted in histories of exclusion, colonization, and state neglect.

What about privacy, censorship, and misinformation?

Tourists and journalists often record Indigenous people without consent, posting videos of festivals or everyday life to social media—sometimes with mocking or clickbait captions. This is a gross violation of privacy that youth cannot easily control.

Participants spoke of self-censorship on political topics out of fear of abduction or violence. This chilling effect is worsened for smaller Indigenous communities, who feel especially exposed.

Misinformation in the Raozan murder case portrayed Indigenous people as cannibalistic. Meme pages amplified the rumor, resulting in violence, exclusion, and even assault against Indigenous students in urban areas.

These harms ripple outward, affecting job prospects, campus life, and even safety in public transport. Social media doesn’t just mirror offline discrimination—it amplifies and mutates it.

Four recommendations to enhance digital experiences

The authors offer several grounded, context-aware recommendations for social media designers and for the Indigenous youth communities themselves.

1. Design for Cultural Privacy and Identity:

• Multi-layered privacy settings should allow Indigenous users to curate posts for different audiences (e.g., family, peers, outsiders).
• Tools for linguistic expression in Indigenous scripts and dialects should be built into platforms, aiding both preservation and private discourse.

2. Healing and Aftercare:

• Digital “healing circles”, modeled on Indigenous practices, could offer moderated spaces for reflection, community building, and trauma support after incidents of online harm.
• Community moderators—respected elders or activists—should facilitate these spaces.

3. Combatting Misinformation:

• Platforms must work with local organizations to flag misrepresentation and hate speech—especially around sensitive events like festivals or political anniversaries.
• Invest in content moderation in minority languages, a consistent failure across most platforms.

4. Supporting Digital Resilience:

• Train Indigenous youth in digital security practices, such as using pseudonyms, encrypted messaging, or linguistic camouflage (many already use native terms for sensitive topics to evade detection).
• Fund community-led content creation, like cultural vlogs, digital storytelling projects, and activist campaigns.

We must do better

This study is a call to action for the entire digital development sector. We must do better.

The Indigenous youth of the CHT are not passive users; they are builders of new digital worlds. They’re creating culture, defending identity, and resisting erasure—one post at a time.

But their labor is done on unsafe terrain.

If we want a just internet, it must be co-created with those on its margins—not just translated for them. In the words of one participant, “Every time we are silent, we lose a part of our story. Social media lets us speak. But we need space to speak safely.”