Keynote speech delivered by science writer and digital media analyst Nalaka Gunawardene at the Sri Lanka National IT Conference held in Colombo from 2 to 4 October 2018.
Nalaka Gunawardene speaking at National IT Conference 2018 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photo by ReadMe.lk
Here is a summary of what I covered (PPT embedded below):
With around a third of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people using at least one type of social media, the phenomenon is no longer limited to cities or English speakers. But as social media users increase and diversify, so do various excesses and abuses on these platforms: hate speech, fake news, identity theft, cyber bullying/harassment, and privacy violations among them.
Public discourse in Sri Lanka has been focused heavily on social media abuses by a relatively small number of users. In a balanced stock taking of the overall phenomenon, the multitude of substantial benefits should also be counted. Social media has allowed ordinary Lankans to share information, collaborate around common goals, pursue entrepreneurship and mobilise communities in times of elections or disasters. In a country where the mainstream media has been captured by political and business interests, social media remains the ‘last frontier’ for citizens to discuss issues of public interest. The economic, educational, cultural benefits of social media for the Lankan society have not been scientifically quantified as yet but they are significant – and keep growing by the year.
Whether or not Sri Lanka needs to regulate social media, and if so in what manner, requires the widest possible public debate involving all stakeholders. The executive branch of government and the defence establishment should NOT be deciding unilaterally on this – as was done in March 2018, when Facebook and Instagram were blocked for 8 days and WhatsApp and Viber were restricted (to text only) owing to concerns that a few individuals had used these services to instigate violence against Muslims in the Eastern and Central Provinces.
In this talk, I caution that social media regulation in the name of curbing excesses could easily be extended to crack down on political criticism and minority views that do not conform to majority orthodoxy. An increasingly insular and unpopular government – now in its last 18 months of its 5-year term – probably fears citizen expressions on social media.
Yet the current Lankan government’s democratic claims and credentials will be tested in how they respond to social media challenges: will that be done in ways that are entirely consistent with the country’s obligations under international human rights laws that have safeguards for the right to Freedom of Expression (FOE)? This is the crucial question.
Already, calls for social media regulation (in unspecified ways) are being made by certain religious groups as well as the military. At a recent closed-door symposium convened by the Lankan defence ministry’s think tank, the military was reported to have said “Misinformation directed at the military is a national security concern” and urged: “Regulation is needed on misinformation in the public domain.”
How will the usually opaque and unpredictable public policy making process in Sri Lanka respond to such partisan and strident advocacy? Might the democratic, societal and economic benefits of social media be sacrificed for political expediency and claims of national security?
To keep overbearing state regulation at bay, social media users and global platforms can step up arrangements for self-regulation, i.e. where the community of users and the platform administrators work together to monitor, determine and remove content that violates pre-agreed norms or standards. However, the presentation acknowledges that this approach is fraught with practical difficulties given the hundreds of languages involved and the tens of millions of new content items being published every day.
What is to be done to balance the competing interests within a democratic framework?
I quote the views of David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression from his June 2018 report to the UN Human Rights Council about online content regulation. He cautioned against the criminalising of online criticism of governments, religion or other public institutions. He also expressed concerns about some recent national laws making global social media companies responsible, at the risk of steep financial penalties, to assess what is illegal online, without the kind of public accountability that such decisions require (e.g. judicial oversight).
Kaye recommends that States ensure an enabling environment for online freedom of expression and that companies apply human rights standards at all stages of their operations. Human rights law gives companies the tools to articulate their positions in ways that respect democratic norms and
counter authoritarian demands. At a minimum, he says, global SM companies and States should pursue radically improved transparency, from rule-making to enforcement of the rules, to ensure user autonomy as individuals increasingly exercise fundamental rights online.
We can shape the new cyber frontier to be safer and more inclusive. But a safer web experience would lose its meaning if the heavy hand of government tries to make it a sanitized, lame or sycophantic environment. Sri Lanka has suffered for decades from having a nanny state, and in the twenty first century it does not need to evolve into a cyber nanny state.
Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum (GMF), in Bonn, Germany, 11 – 13 June 2018
Trends like ultra-nationalistic media, hate speech and fake news have all been around for decades — certainly well before the web emerged in the 1990s. What digital tools and the web have done is to ‘turbo-charge’ these trends.
This is the main thrust of this week’s Ravaya column, published on 1 July 2018, where I capture some discussions and debates at the 11thDeutsche Welle Global Media Forum (GMF), held in Bonn, Germany, from 11 to 13 June 2018.
I was among the 2,000+ media professionals and experts from over 100 countries who participated in the event. Across many plenaries and parallel sessions, we discussed a whole range of issues related to politics and human rights, media development and innovative journalism concepts.
Nalaka Gunawardene moderating moderated session on “Digitalization and polarization of the media: How to overcome growing inequalities and a divided public” at DW Global Media Forum 2018 in Bonn, 13 June 2018
Today, I was interviewed on video for BBC Sinhala service for my views on hate speech and fake news. Given below is my remarks in Sinhala, excerpts from which are to be used.
In summary, I said these phenomena predate social media and the web itself, but cyber space has enabled easier and faster dissemination of falsehoods and hatred. Additionally, anonymity and pseudonymity — fundamental qualities of the web – seem to embolden some to behave badly without revealing their identities.
The societal and state responses must be measured, proportionate and cautious, so as not to restrict everybody’s freedom of expression for the misdeeds of a numerical minority of web users. I urged a multi-pronged response including:
– adopting clear legal definitions of hate speech and fake news;
– enforcing the existing laws, without fear or favour, against those peddling hatred and falsehoods;
– mobilising the community of web users to voluntarily monitor and report misuses online; and
– promoting digital literacy at all levels in society, to nurture responsible web use and social media use.
Some say that blogging is in decline and claim that the days are numbered for this art of web-based writing and sharing of all kinds of content. But not (yet?) in Sri Lanka’s local languages of Sinhala and Tamil, where vibrant blogospheres exist, sustaining their own subcultures and dynamics.
In this article (in Sinhala) written in April 2017 and published in Desathiya magazine of November 2017, I I look around the Sinhala language blogosphere in Sri Lanka, and offer a few glimpses on how the myriad conversations are unfolding. In that process, I also try to demystify blogs — about which popular myths and misconceptions persist in Lankan society (some of them peddled by the mainstream media or uninformed mass media academics).
Sinhala language Blogging in Sri Lanka: An overview by Nalaka Gunawardene, Desathiya magazine, Nov 2017
Around 2,000 media professionals and experts from over 100 countries gathered at the World Conference Centre Bonn (WCCB) for the event, themed on ‘Global Inequalities’. Across many plenaries and parallel sessions, we discussed a whole range of issues related to politics and human rights, media development and innovative journalism concepts.
On 13 June 2018, I moderated a session on “Digitalization and polarization of the media: How to overcome growing inequalities and a divided public” which was organised by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) or Institute for Foreign Relations, a century old entity located in Stuttgart.
Curd Knüpfer, Co-Head Research Group on Digitalization and the Transnational Public Sphere, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Freie Universität Berlin
L to R – Nalaka Gunawardene (moderator), Christian Humborg, Jillian York, and Curd Knupfer. [Photo courtesy DW GMF 2018]Here are my opening remarks for the panel, setting it in context:
Our topic resonates deeply with my personal experiences. I come from Sri Lanka, where a brutal civil war lasted for 26 years and ended nearly a decade ago. But even today, my society remains highly polarised along ethnic, religious and political lines. This is very worrying, especially as we are a multicultural society.
Our media, for the most part, reflect this division in society — and many sections of the media actually keep dividing us even further! Reconciliation is the last thing some of our tribal media owners and editors seem to want…
This situation is by no means unique to Sri Lanka. Well into the 21st century’s second decade, tribalistic media seems to be proliferating both in analog and digital realms! We can find examples from the East and the West, and from the global North and the South.
But let’s be clear: these trends predate the digitalisation of (what is still called) mainstream media and the emergence of entirely digital media. Trends like ultra-nationalistic media, hate speech and fake news have all been around for decades — certainly well before the web emerged in the 1990s.
What digital tools and the web have done is to ‘turbo-charge’ these trends. The ease with which content can now be created and the speed at which it can be globally shared is unprecedented. As is the intensity of misuse of social media platforms, and the spreading of deliberate falsehoods, or disinformation. Conspiracy theorists, spin doctors and other assorted charlatans never had it so good!
What is all this doing to our politics and societies, especially in democracies?
In today’s discussion, we will consider both the established media – television, radio and newspapers – as well as the newer media that are digitally produced and distributed online. (Demarcations are blurred because many ‘old media’ content is also now digitally available.)
Nalaka Gunawardene moderating session on “Digitalization and polarization of the media: How to overcome growing inequalities and a divided public” at DW Global Media Forum 2018 in Bonn, 13 June 2018 [Photo courtesy DW GMF 2018]In today’s panel, we want to recognise a few key questions, all of them at ‘big picture’ level:
How are old media and new media so much better at polarising societies than in uniting or unifying societies? Do they tape into a fundamental tribal instinct among us?
Is the free and open internet, especially in the form of social media, undermining free and open societies?
Around the world, digital media have been a powerful force for the good, promoting human rights, democracy and social empowerment. But is that era of idealism coming to an end? What next?
How is the role of news journalism changing in an age of foreign policy making that is increasingly impulsive and driven by social media?
What policies, regulations and actions are needed to avoid undesirable outcomes and to harness all media for the public good?
We may not find all the answers today, but it is very important that we ask these questions and collectively search for answers.
Some of the participants at session on “Digitalization and polarization of the media” at DW Global Media Forum 2018 [Photo courtesy DW GMF 2018]Here is the panel description written by the organisers:
Populism and nationalism are on the rise in many democracies. Recent elections, especially Trump’s victory in the US, are proof of deep social cleavages and the polarization of the media. The media system itself seems to be both the problem and the solution. It reveals the inequality of access to media, to a range of opinions, and to a true exchange that takes place outside of everyone’s echo chamber, and it highlights unequal levels of media literacy.
How can the media itself contribute to overcoming this polarization and disrupt these echo chambers? What does this fragmentation mean for political debates in democracies? How is the role of news journalism changing in an age of foreign policy making that is increasingly impulsive and driven by social media? How important is net neutrality? And what media policies are needed?
Speakers for the DW-GMF 2018 session on “Digitalization and polarization of the media: How to overcome growing inequalities and a divided public”
This is an annotated Sinhala language adaptation of Facebook’s Community Standards as they stood on 25 March 2018. Note this is not a verbatim translation and also not an officially sanctioned translation. It has been adapted and annotated as a public service by Nalaka Gunawardene, new media analyst and activist.
I discuss Facebook’s Community Standards and the complaints mechanism currently in place, and the difficulties that non-English language content poses for Facebook’s designated monitors looking out for violations of these standards. Hate speech and other objectionable content produced in local languages like Sinhala sometimes pass through FB’s scrutiny. This indicates more needs to be done both by the platform’s administrators, as well as by concerned FB users who spot such content.
But I sound a caution about introducing new Sri Lankan laws to regulate social media, as that can easily stifle citizens’ right to freedom of expression to question, challenge and criticise politicians and officials. Of course, FoE can have reasonable and proportionate limits, and our challenge is to have a public dialogue on what these limits are for online speech and self-expression that social media enables.
Aluth Parlimenthuwa live talk show on Social Media Blocking in Sri Lanka – TV Derana, 14 March 2018
Sri Lanka’s first ever social media blocking lasted from 7 to 15 March 2018. During that time, Facebook and Instagram were completely blocked while chat apps WhatsApp and Viber were restricted (no images, audio or video, but text allowed).
On 7 March 2018, the country’s telecom regulator, Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRCSL), ordered all telecom operators to impose this blocking across the country for three days, Reuters reported. This was “to prevent the spread of communal violence”, the news agency quoted an unnamed government official as saying. In the end, the blocking lasted 8 days.
Both actions are unprecedented. In the 23 years Sri Lanka has had commercial Internet services, it has never imposed complete network shutdowns (although during the last phase of the civil war between 2005 and 2009, the government periodically shut down telephone services in the Northern and Eastern Provinces). Nor has any social media or messaging platforms been blocked before.
I protested this course of action from the very outset. Restricting public communications networks is ill-advised at any time — and especially bad during an emergency when people are frantically seeking reliable situation updates and/or sharing information about the safety of loved ones.
Blocking selected websites or platforms is a self-defeating exercise in any case, since those who are more digitally savvy – many hate peddlers among them –can and will use proxy servers to get around. It is the average web user who will be deprived of news, views and updates.
While the blocking was on, I gave many media interviews to local and international media. I urged the government “to Police the streets, not the web!”.
At the same time, I acknowledged and explained how a few political and religious extremist groups have systematically ‘weaponised’ social media in Sri Lanka during recent years. These groups have been peddling racially charged hate speech online and offline. A law to deal with hate speech has been in the country’s law books for over a decade. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Act No 56 of 2007 prohibits the advocacy of ‘religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’. This law, fully compliant with international human rights standards, has not been enforced.
On 14 March 2018, I took part in the ‘Aluth Parlimenthuwa’ TV talk show of TV Derana on this topic, where I articulated the above and related views. The other panelists were Deputy Minister Karu Paranawithana, presidential advisor Shiral Lakthilaka, Bar Association of Sri Lanka chairman U R de Silva, and media commentator Mohan Samaranayake.
This comment on Sri Lanka’s social media blocking that commenced on 7 March 2018, was written on 8 March 2018 at the request of Irida Lakbima Sunday broadsheet newspaper, which carried excerpts from it in their issue of 11 March 2018. The full text is shared here, for the record.
On 1 March 2018, Facebook announced that it was ending its six-nation experiment known as ‘Explore Feed’. The idea was to create a version of Facebook with two different News Feeds: one as a dedicated place with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated place for posts from Pages.
Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed at Facebook wrote: “People don’t want two separate feeds. In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”
An international news agency asked me to write a comment on this from Sri Lanka, one of the six countries where the Explore feed was tried out from October 2017 to February 2018. Here is my full text, for the record:
Did Facebook’s “Explore” experiment increase
our exposure to fake news?
Comment by Nalaka Gunawardene, researcher and commentator on online and digital media; Fellow, Internet Governance Academy in Germany
Despite its mammoth size and reach, Facebook is still a young company only 14 years old this year. As it evolves, it keeps experimenting – mistakes and missteps are all part of that learning process.
But given how large the company’s reach is – with over 2 billion users worldwide – there can be far reaching and unintended consequences.
Last October, Facebook split its News Feed into two automatically sorted streams: one for non-promoted posts from FB Pages and publishers (which was called “Explore”), and the other for contents posted by each user’s friends and family.
Sri Lanka was one of six countries where this trial was conducted, without much notice to users. (The other countries were Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia.)
Five months on, Facebook company has found that such a separation did not increase connections with friends and family as it had hoped. So the separation will end — in my view, not a moment too soon!
What can we make of this experiment and its outcome?
Humans are complex creatures when it comes to how we consume information and how we relate to online content. While many among us like to look up what our social media ‘friends’ have recommended or shared, we remain curious of, and open to, content coming from other sources too.
I personally found it tiresome to keep switching back and forth between my main news feed and what FB’s algorithms sorted under the ‘Explore’ feed. Especially on mobile devices – through which 80% of Lankan web users go online – most people simply overlooked or forgot to look up Explore feed. As a result, they missed out a great deal of interesting and diverse content.
For me as an individual user, a key part of the social media user experience is what is known as Serendipity – accidentally making happy discoveries. The Explore feed reduced my chances of Serendipity on Facebook, and as a result, in recent months I found myself using Facebook less often and for shorter periods of time.
For publishers of online newspapers, magazines and blogs, Facebook’s unilateral decision to cluster their content in the Explore feed meant significantly less visibility and click-through traffic. Fewer Facebook users were looking at Explore feed and then going on to such publishers’ content.
I am aware of mainstream media houses as well as bloggers in Sri Lanka who suffered as a result. Publishers in the other five countries reported similar experiences.
For the overall information landscape too, the Explore feed separation was bad news. When updates or posts from mainstream news media and socially engaged organisations were coming through on a single, consolidated news feed, our eyes and ears were kept more open. We were less prone to being confined to the chatter of our friends or family, or being trapped in ‘eco chambers’ of the likeminded.
Content from reputed news media outlets and bloggers sometimes comes with their own biases, for sure, but these act as a useful ‘bulwark’ against fake news and mind-rotting nonsense that is increasing in Sri Lanka’s social media.
It was thus ill-advised of Facebook to have taken such content away and tucked it in a place called Explore that few of us bothered to visit regularly.
The Explore experiment may have failed, but I hope Facebook administrators learn from it to fine-tune their platform to be a more responsive and responsible place for global cacophony to evolve.
Indeed, the entire Facebook is an on-going, planetary level experiment in which all its 2 billion plus members are participating. Our common challenge is to balance our urge for self-expression and sharing with responsibility and restraint. The justified limitations on free speech continue to apply on new media too.
Open Minds! 