The anger without a cure

by Sanjana Haththotuwa-May 4, 2019, 6:28 pm 

Seeing a country grieve through millions of data points is a strange experience. Posts, videos, photos, memes, articles, tweets, status updates, cartoons, drawings, podcasts on the Easter Sunday terrorism already number in the tens of thousands. Those who have in some way engaged with this content, in the around 1,000 accounts on Facebook and an equivalent number on Twitter I monitor closely and daily, number in the tens of millions. Some videos, already, have been viewed more times than the population of Sri Lanka. In fact, the Easter Sunday attacksresulted in a tsunami of content that exceeded the volume and velocity of production at the height of pushback against the constitutional putsch late last year.Keep in mind that this rate of engagement and content consumption is despite the longest ever social media block in the country, lasting 9 days.

My column is often pegged to the nature of content and conversation on social media, and why it matters to readers of this newspaper. This writing is pegged to the belief that politics, governance and ultimately, the timbre of our increasingly fragile democratic fabric is shaped by content and opinions furnished from, forged on or framed through social media. What kind of country we will wake up to is no longer a given. The degree of anxiety, expressed, privately shared and hidden, is real and growing. Social media provides easy publication and promotion of emotions, which academics call the contagion effect. In a vacuum of credible, reassuring or official communications, fear or anxiety latch on to and predominantly shape the appreciation of content that arouses anger, kinetic action and violent reactions, over reasoned response, reconciliation or reflection. Both the fog of conflicting narratives and the absence of credible accounts from government create a context ripe for the weaponisation of grief, loss and pain. This is done in a number of ways, by blatantly offensive content or, far more dangerously, by material anchored to some truth, but taken out of context, features a larger narrative, scenario or story entirely removed from reality.The harvest from this crop of hate, insecurity and othering is socio-political instability that in spiralling towards the violent resolution of conflict, aids the further entrenchment of what gives rise to extremism. The worst possible responses are projected and perceived as the best possible solutions. Knowing this, and leveraging the opportunity, malevolent actors, for partisan, political or political gain, produce and push out content that inflames tensions and incites hate.

All this, to many of this newspaper, will reaffirm their belief that the government was entirely right in blocking social media in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday. I have two responses – one an analogy, the other based on hard data. Consider for a moment social media like one would the national grid. You don’t need to be an electrical engineer to understand that if there’s a problem with a specific place or section of the grid, the solution is not to shut the entire grid down indefinitely and without any warning. Power distribution accounts for sudden surges and spikes in certain areas. It can also, based on historical consumption patterns, ascertain and plan for consumption at certain times, in certain areas. If short-circuits or frequent transformer failures are reported from a certain area, the problem is clearly local and is addressed as much. If necessary, power cuts in the area are established to address the problem, without affecting the entire, national grid. Constant oversight is necessary, for repairs and maintenance operations. While management and planning can and must be done at a national level, by its very nature, the grid requires local oversight and knowledge. A single office in Colombo cannot manage a national grid. A neglected or overwhelmed grid will fail, and often with catastrophic consequences.

What our government does in times of a national emergency is the equivalent of shutting down the entire electricity grid. Evident after Easter Sunday, cementing what was known before, is the complete, catastrophic absence of any coherent, cohesive or concise crisis and political communications from the PM or President. There is no point, anymore, flagging this. If acknowledged as something we will suffer from in the short time left for this government, the analogy above recommends a more nuanced, strategic and sensible approach to social media oversight. The study of content, locating what is produced in context, monitoring key trends, capturing accounts that show a proclivity towards malevolent behaviour or output, gathering information on distribution patterns, vectors and participant voices featuring hate or violence – all this and more, not unlike the upkeep of a grid, is necessary. All this can be done with legal and regulatory frameworks already present. No new laws are needed. Social media companies, under intense and relentless pressure in the West, are investing heavily in oversight and support structures to government as well as civil society to stem the flow of misinformation, hate and violence. The very companies that a few years ago scoffed at their role, reach and relevance in fomenting hate are now invested more than governments in technologies to stop or stem content that results in real world hate or harm. With all this in play, the Sri Lankan government’s approach is an awfully simplistic one, treating social media like a switch and believing that turning it all off will somehow help protect citizenry. This is what children do when scared, not what adults governing a country should do in a crisis.

This is also where data comes in. Data in the aggregate or at scale – looking at thousands of accounts, tens of thousands of comments and tens of millions of engagements –negates individual opinions. Debating data requires arguments anchored to data, escaping the gravitational pull of invective and insult that often accompanies any contest of personal opinion in Sri Lanka. Through the analysis of very large datasets and their visualisation, I placed in public how the social media block was inefficient and importantly, ineffective. On Facebook, there is scant evidence that the block, in the two days after it was imposed on the 21st, impacted output of and engagement with a large cluster of gossip pages on Facebook. However, no other cluster monitored was impacted. By the end of the week, every single cluster I monitor comprising just over 1,000 accounts in total showed a clear increase from the previous week by way of output and engagement. Twitter wasn’t blocked, and unsurprisingly shows some of the highest levels of activity I’ve ever seen. Tellingly, the same government that shut off access Facebook continued to post on it, leading me to believe that even those in high political office knew full well that millions of citizens could and would circumvent the block. Some videos published by political parties and leading news channels were viewed by more than the population of Sri Lanka in the space of a week, indicating a thirst for news and information over what was an unprecedented situation across the country.

If the intent was to control, curtail or even censor content that incited hate and violence, there was no evidence of the government’s intervention. Many ordinary citizens, however, stepped up to the challenge, leading some to even design, develop and deploy an app to verify rumours. A clear trend was also evident in the takedown of posts and content reported by users. Despite all this, disturbingly, the data suggests a steep rise in anger followed by an unprecedented wave of sadness on social media, over the course of the week. There is also a lot of love recorded on Facebook, but qualitative analysis very clearly shows that this expression is around content that is bitterly critical of the government, who tens of thousands if not more hold directly responsible for the loss of life on Easter Sunday. I am entirely convinced those in power, who do not understand social media, remain oblivious to this or how it will invariablyfind expression in electoral or street-corner dynamics.

I could go on, but what’s clear is that Western journalism and scholarship, which after the Easter Sunday attacks welcomed as necessary and inevitable the social media block, as well as the Sri Lankan government, which claimed the block was implemented to protect citizens, were both very wrong.

Since Easter Sunday, I have struggled to find the words to express the urgency of meaningfully addressing grief and growing grievances on social media. A few of us are doing our best to push back on the sickening exploitation of terrorism to ensure much more of it. For the first time in a long time, I am not convinced it is enough to stop the country’s plunge into an abyss I can see all too clearly, every day.