Namal Rajapaksa, bots and trolls: New contours of digital propaganda and online discourse in Sri Lanka

Image courtesy Congress is investigating how Twitter bots may have influenced the US election, by Quartz

SANJANA HATTOTUWA AND YUDHANJAYA WIJERATNE- 01/24/2018

Late 2017, the Twitter account of Groundviews was getting trolled – or in other words, had bitter invective levelled against it in a sustained manner – in an entirely new way. This piqued our interest. Since its inception in 2006, Groundviews has generated all manner of violent, venomous pushback and responses to content it has produced, published and promoted. Over the years, this feedback has ranged from threats of bodily harm and worse to, far more often, the most virulent of expletives. On the other side of the discursive spectrum, the site has also been extremely fortunate to host and feature considered, civil engagement including principled disagreement and coherently articulated alternative points of view.

With the first of its kind comment and content moderation policy in Sri Lanka, the worst commentary generated on the website never gets published – including in all instances bitter invective directed at the Rajapaksas, including the former President and his brother, the Secretary of Defence Gotabaya Rajapaksa, when and after they were in power. We have less control over social media, where through individual or institutional accounts, content published on Groundviews is repeatedly reacted to and often reviled. This pushback is now expected, and also comes from known quarters depending on the issues we cover. By known, it is not always the real, physical identity or geo-location of an interlocutor we refer to, but their digital avatar, which over time, comes to represent – almost like a signature or brand – a particular political ideology, worldview and bias. At Groundviews, the curators pay attention to this pushback because it is vital, as a media producer, to understand what triggers trolls and what their motivations are to the extent they can be discerned from online interactions, content and commentary. Knowing how and from where the worst pushback is likely to come from, over what issues and at what time, amongst other factors, is important when shaping a progressive content agenda and producing content that informs, influences and instigates democratic change, critique and contestation.

Trolls maketh a politican?

In the last quarter of 2017, pushback over Twitter to content Groundviews pushed out over the same platform came from sources not encountered or interacted with before. This piqued the interest of the site’s founding editor, Sanjana Hattotuwa, for one key reason. All the accounts publishing content against Groundviews were overwhelmingly promoting and partial to Namal Rajapaksa, a Member of Parliament and the extremely (social) media savvy son of the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The discovery also came at a time when Groundviews was researching the weaponisation of social media to game, and ultimately undermine, democratic electoral processes. As the Economist recently averred in an exhaustive article looking the impact social media has on democracy and democratic institutions,

In 2010 Wael Ghonim, an entrepreneur and fellow at Harvard University, was one of the administrators of a Facebook page called “We are all Khaled Saeed”, which helped spark the Egyptian uprising centred on Tahrir Square. “We wanted democracy,” he says today, “but got mobocracy.” Fake news spread on social media is one of the “biggest political problems facing leaders around the world”, says Jim Messina, a political strategist who has advised several presidents and prime ministers. Governments simply do not know how to deal with this—except, that is, for those that embrace it.

This is now already a well-studied phenomenon even though there is no consensus as to what can be done about it. The issue is complex, involving governments, the UN and other international agencies, civil society, Silicon Valley companies, and a dark economy where ickients, ranging from individuals to governments, are willing to pay whatever it takes to drown out, discredit, deny or decry anyone and any narrative that contests what they alone want kept alive online. Evidence of how social media was used to target and deviously influence voters in constituencies ranging from the US to the UK, France and Germany are a Google search away. What matters is not so much the technical details about how social media is weaponised, but the fact that in a country like Sri Lanka – where there is very high adult literacy and yet, extremely poor media and information literacy – what is promoted over social media is often what is trusted, shared widely and acted upon. This presents unique challenges for, amongst others, election monitoring bodies, which are traditionally geared to look at electoral malpractices at the point of exercising one’s franchise, violence that prevents or hinders this and malpractices during the collection, counting or the release of final results. The kind of threat social media that’s weaponised to promote a particular political ideology, idea, person, party or process is not something Sri Lanka’s government writ large, and in particular the Elections Department or any independent election violence monitoring body to date has even imagined, leave aside developed the technical capacity to monitor and address.

But how to make the connection with all this and the kind of Twitter accounts that were increasingly trolling Groundviews? One started with very basic analysis of what could be discerned about the Twitter accounts using nothing beyond tools and services openly available online. There was no hacking or doxxing (the often-vindictive publication of private information) involved. The date of creation on any public Twitter account can be gleaned from a number of web platforms. We used http://www.mytwitterbirthday.com. Accounts focussed on Twitter included,

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