
Fearing More Violence, Sri Lanka Silences Social Media - panarky
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/asia/sri-lanka-social-media.html
======
panarky
_Sri Lanka’s action “is a damning indictment” of companies that once portrayed
the platforms as vehicles for liberation...

Last year, the government briefly blocked social networks after viral rumors
and calls to violence, circulating largely on Facebook, appeared to provoke a
wave of anti-Muslim riots and lynchings.

Government officials had repeatedly warned Facebook, which also owns Instagram
and WhatsApp, that the posts could lead to violence.

Company officials largely failed to respond until the government shut down
access, after which they promised to hire more moderators and improve
communication._

And from [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/asia/sri-lanka-
expl...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/asia/sri-lanka-
explosion.html)

 _Rather than trusting in Facebook and other companies to police their
networks for hate speech or incitement that could arise as a result of
Sunday’s attacks, the government was treating the platforms as too dangerous
to remain online._

------
jopsen
Wow, are we know so scared of mob mentality that we don't condemn brazen free
speech interference?

I know social media platforms can create mobs, but since when are we all
scared that:

> That digital rights and press freedom advocates might now sympathize, if not
> agree, with Sri Lanka’s action.

This seems questionable to me, and problematic for people trying to find each
other.

~~~
mikeash
I’m a firm believer in free speech and think this is a bad move.

However, there’s a vast difference between targeted censorship of forbidden
topics and a temporary blanket ban on certain forms of communication. This
isn’t _good_ , but it’s pretty mild. Temporary limits on fundamental freedoms
during an emergency are pretty common, even in the good old USA.

~~~
code_sloth
Free speech is about the right to __articulate__ opinions and ideas. To
articulate ideas and opinions, you have to think and formulate your thoughts.

What Facebook enables and optimizes for can hardly be called free speech.
Articulation is not encouraged, merely the spreading of thoughts (both good
and bad). Engagement has been optimized for advertising purposes. It led to
banal agreement in the form of likes and reshares. There is hardly any
discourse, people get silo-ed in echo chambers, and the extreme ends of the
spectrum get magnified. Confirmation bias rules, and bad ideas aren't defeated
by good ideas because they hardly come into contact.

So no, Facebook isn't enabling free speech, as much as they'd like to claim
they are. At best they are a communication tool, nothing more.

~~~
tdhoot
Free speech is not only about articulation. It's also about the ability to
share, disseminate, and influence others.

~~~
code_sloth
Speech without thought isn't free speech. It's just people and sometimes mobs
saying things.

Freedom of information flow isn't the same thing. Democracy works best with an
informed electorate. Information flow without discourse is just
indoctrination. And that's what Facebook (unintendedly) optimizes for.

~~~
NeonVice
Speech even without thought is still free speech. You would hope that the most
thoughtful speech would be easily recognized and followed in place of its
opposite. However, free speech does not exist in a world where only one group
decides what is thoughtful speech.

~~~
tus87
The only speech without thought is tourettes.

~~~
bencollier49
And glossolalia, and sleeptalking. Oh, and recitation from memory. Probably
some other things.

Depending on your definition of "thought".

------
matchagaucho
I've been travelling in foreign countries where it felt like political
tensions could be cut with a knife.

And in those moments, " _everyone_ " is heads down into their smartphones.
Just thumb scrolling and looking for anything that reinforces their beliefs.

~~~
meowface
Sounds like you just accurately described the United States in 2019, as well.
Any country undergoing political turmoil is in a similar boat, and sadly
probably always will be. The technological means will just continue to evolve.

~~~
jammygit
Or 2016...

~~~
talmand
Or just about any year of your choosing. Today it's phones, before then it was
newspapers, before then it was the town square, before then it was the village
crier, before then it was the guy that talked to spirits/gods/sky, and so
on...

This is not a new thing.

------
rdl
This seems like a bad move for both moral and practical reasons.

Morally, free communication is a basic human right.

Practically, having a bunch of churches/hotels attacked by an easily-
identifiable group, followed by shutting off communications tools, would
probably turn people from "death squad curious" into hardcore whatever the
local version of hacking your enemies apart with a machete is (parang?). A
reasonable but scared person might assume the attacks are of a larger scale,
or supported or condoned by the government, or otherwise an ongoing event,
rather than a tragic event which happened and is now over and could be left to
policy solutions. I know if 9/11 or something like that had happened and then
the USG had immediately tried to institute a communications blackout (except
for state controlled broadcast media), a lot of people I know would be very
on-edge.

~~~
panarky
Sri Lanka has a history of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp amplifying racial
hatred, riots and lynchings.

They don't trust that Facebook has effectively neutralized a force that is
tearing their civilization apart.

If Facebook created a monster that they can no longer control, what else
should governments do to protect their citizens?

~~~
pertymcpert
The monster exists in their people, not Facebook. I’m no fan of the company
but it’s not reasonable to say it’s something wrong they’ve done.

Who the hell advocatea violence? Let alone in such large numbers?! Sri Lanka
has a deeper problem.

~~~
panarky
Facebook's signature feature is that it's viral. It amplifies ideas and
emotions.

And it's most effective at amplifying negative ideas and emotions like rumor,
gossip, fear and hate.

Of course the root cause is people. But before Facebook, the bad stuff was
slow to spread, and geographically localized.

Facebook released an accelerant, a catalyst into the world. And Facebook has
lost control of the monster it created.

~~~
stickfigure
Human beings can't be trusted with the power to communicate among themselves?

~~~
panarky
_> Human beings can't be trusted with ..._

Very few items could fill in this blank to make a true statement:

"Every human should be trusted with _unrestricted and amplified_
_____________."

If you create a superhuman thing and release it into the world, you damn well
better control it.

------
chriselles
I’m happy to defer to others with more relevant regional cultural ground
truth.

But it’s my understanding that social media, specifically WhatsApp, has been
accused of amplifying fake news and violence in India, resulting in reduced
sharing limits to mitigate against malignant virility.

14 months ago there were anti Muslim riots in Sri Lanka and more recently
major Bangladesh/Myanmar Muslim refugee crisis.

If I was running security in Sri Lanka I would also consider a temporary shut
down or throttling of social media to mitigate the amplification of sectarian
violence.

This is a real tragedy, especially when looked at in perspective with the
incredibly violent, costly, and lengthy Sri Lankan Civil War.

When looked at thru the lens of having followed the Sri Lankan Civil War at a
distance, the extreme violence(suicide bomber was “invented there) and urban
terrorism was a near constant.

This is a horrible tragedy that I hope Sri Lankan can contain and prevent
viral escalation.

~~~
anigbrowl
If you are following the Indian election I found an interesting article
yesterday about how bots are being deployed on social media to influence that
contest.

[https://medium.com/dfrlab/electionwatch-bots-on-both-
sides-i...](https://medium.com/dfrlab/electionwatch-bots-on-both-sides-in-
india-c87c84040229)

------
speeq
Unfortunately, Sri Lanka has a long history of violence even before the age of
social media:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
And sporadic community-based strife prior to that, beginning certainly no
later than the first millennium AD.

------
HenryBemis
I read all so far comments, I don't think that blocking social media is to
silence voices and block freedom of speech. I strongly believe (from a crowd-
control/security standpoint) that eliminating social media, whatsapp, signal,
etc, the hidden communication channels are removed.

So if the government knows that e.g. Henry Bemis is a known trouble-maker, it
is easier to monitor his phonecalls, emails, SMS and find out what are his
next steps of this bomber/terrorist/whatever. If Henry Bemis is using Signal,
WhatsApp, Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, etc. it is easier to coordinate the
next steps of an attack, awaken sleepers etc. without the government's
security forces to be able to react equally fast.

Typical counter-terrorism stuff (or I just have a wild imagination).

~~~
ATsch
This might apply to "traditional" terrorism, that is centrally organized and
coordinated. This is however not how most terrorism seems to work these days.
Instead, we have something that's been called "stochastic terrorism". Messages
calling for violence are spread by people, perhaps deliberately in the hope of
someone acting upon them. Given a large enough reach of the message and enough
people willing to commit these acts, this quickly becomes something incredibly
hard to fight. I'm not sure about it's efficacy, but turning off social media
is certainly not a completely invalid way to attempt to prevent more of that
happening.

~~~
identity-haver
If preventing "stochastic terrorism" was the reason they turned off social
media, shouldn't they have done it before the bombs exploded, possibly even
before any of the terrorists used it, and not afterwards?

------
malwarebytess
>A growing body of research has linked social media to religious and racial
violence.

>Social media platforms build their businesses on sophisticated algorithms
that serve up content that will keep users engaged. This favors posts that tap
into negative, primal emotions like anger and fear, studies suggest.

I think governments, and researchers, are going to find that censoring social
media doesn't have as large an effect as they imagine. Most of it is noise
anyway. Buzz buzz.

~~~
pugworthy
It is noise, but the noise is fuel on a fire sometimes.

------
Mirioron
It just goes to show that governments are going to censor when they feel like
it. If your only contact with someone is through social media then you'd have
no way to contact them to find out if they're okay.

On the other hand, I can understand short term temporary shutdowns to try to
stop further violence, but that's not what Sri Lanka is doing in this case.

~~~
save_ferris
"Last year, the government briefly blocked social networks after viral rumors
and calls to violence, circulating largely on Facebook, appeared to provoke a
wave of anti-Muslim riots and lynchings.

Government officials had repeatedly warned Facebook, which also owns Instagram
and WhatsApp, that the posts could lead to violence."

Sri Lanka isn't trying prevent people from communicating with each other or
censorship. Sounds like they've been bitten by social media-driven violence in
the past, which wouldn't be the first country to see this phenomenon
(Myanmar).

It's so easy to assume a corrupt government motive here, but we've seen ethnic
violence perpetuated on social media in the past. What's a government supposed
to do when that happens?

~~~
Mirioron
> _What 's a government supposed to do when that happens?_

If people perpetuate ethnic violence through cell phones, does the government
ban phones? If people perpetuate ethnic violence through speaking, will the
government ban speaking?

------
username223
I wonder what would happen if they went back to a strictly chronological feed,
instead of one optimized for "engagement"? Sure, it wouldn't eliminate any of
the hate, but it also wouldn't deliberately concentrate it at the top of the
page. People would still see "KILL THEM ALL," but the selfies and cat memes
mixed in might put things in perspective.

------
csense
How does the block work on a technical level?

Did they just nicely ask Facebook to geo-IP block their whole country, and
Facebook agreed voluntarily?

Is there some legal process, where Facebook's under threat of having
money/property in the country seized and/or employees in the country arrested
if they don't comply?

Or are they doing it without Facebook's assistance? Do they have government-
controlled routers that can blackhole specific DNS queries or IP address
ranges? Or put their ISP's under threat of some legal process to implement the
same?

How do we make the Internet more robust against the specific attack launched
by the government? Or should governments always be able to shut down sites
they don't like, when they judge it necessary?

------
identity-haver
One part of me hopes that governments keep doing this every time there's as
much as a bad mugging, so that people will stop relying on the ability of
their government-controlled ISP and a US-controlled cloud platform to
communicate with each other and maybe try some new P2P technology, or possibly
just talk to each other in person instead.

Then again, this is wishful thinking. The only reason the Sri Lankan
government has to resort to such a drastic and ham-fisted measure is that they
don't yet have the clout or connection to call their friends at Google,
Facebook, & Twitter and say "immediately shadowban this set of keywords" like
the US and EU can.

------
apo
Disappointing to see that this is one of the first tools a government reaches
for in a crisis. It's one of the worst possible responses because of how well
censorship plays into the hands of skilled extremists.

------
narrator
While they're at it, they might want to ban whatever the people who committed
the acts of violence against the churches were using.

------
Kim_Bruning
I just wish people used this flash-mob-forming capability for good more often
than evil. :-/

I don't think it's hardly exploited enough!

------
village-idiot
It says a lot about Facebook’s low standing that a lot of people, myself
included, are generally OK with it being blocked during emergencies.

------
HNthrow22
"The extraordinary step reflects growing global concern, particularly among
governments, about the capacity of American-owned networks to spin up
violence."

"Officials blocked the platforms, he said, out of fear that misinformation
about the attacks and hate speech could spread, provoking more violence."

Good, a step in the right direction and finally officials are connecting the
dots on this. I know HN hates to hear this but this is long overdue. It's my
view that the executives in charge of these social networks should face
criminal prosecution for their supreme negligence and wildly irresponsible
behavior, allowing extremism to spread and hateful ideologies to flourish in
the name of increasing quarterly engagement metrics. Free speech has little to
do with this.

Social media is a fertile breeding ground for hate and a powerful recruitment
tool for extremists. I doubt we're able to sort through all the FUD and
misinformation, concerted and successful efforts to dictate public opinion and
change narratives to suit whatever special interests or political agendas.
We're truly in the post-truth era, with the power in the hands of a few SV
elite and billionaire aristocrats. From everything I've seen I don't see
mankind sorting this out before it's too late for all of us. Social media is
the great filter.

