Cross-posted from the ICT4Peace Foundation’s website. ### ICT4Peace is very pleased to announce that Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor ICT4Peace Foundation and PhD candidate at Otago University’s National Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies (NCPACS) has co-launched and will lead the research on a first of its kind academic partnership in New Zealand with Twitter on the use of social media in the ...

The green beans were wrapped in Time. The magazine, not the passage. The lentils usually in a Newsweek. Any purchase of over a kilo of manioc was rewarded by indeterminable foreign newsprint on international affairs as its wrapping. Perhaps my love and insatiable consumption of manioc was linked to the possibility of a reward by way of more crushed, stained ...

‘Upon a Sleepless Isle’, the astonishingly good new book by Andrew Fidel Fernando has a vital lesson for new and generally excitable students of misinformation in Sri Lanka. Countering the spread of rumour, from the risible to the inflammable, is all the rage. The focus and framing are largely on Facebook as well as WhatsApp, but the general debate is ...

Excerpt from a letter penned to the UN Secretary-General penned by me on behalf of the ICT4Peace Foundation. Originally posted on the Foundation’s website on 19 June 2019. ### Image courtesy Vice The ICT4Peace Foundation congratulates the Secretary-General of the UN on the launch of the UN strategy and plan of action on hate speech. The Foundation’s research into and ...

First posted on the ICT4Peace Foundation’s website on 17 June 2019. ### On 20 May 2019, Sanjana Hattotuwa, a Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation since 2006, gave a well-attended public lecture at the University of Zurich on the role, reach and relevance of social media in responding to kinetic and digital violence, including the potential as well as ...

Cross-posted from the ICT4Peace Foundation website. Originally published on 13 June 2019. ### Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, Sanjana Hattotuwa, joined the 2019 National Dialogues Conference via Skype video on 12 June to both present a short overview of the state-of-play and as a panellist discussing the interplay between politics, social media, conflict, peace and dialogue. As noted ...

Cross-posted from ICT4Peace Foundation website. Originally posted on 10 June 2019. First two questions on (social) media literacy and the staggering bias present, today, in AI and ML architectures were penned and posted by me, complementing two others on AI’s weaponisation from a colleague. ### To support the launch of the UN SG Guterres’ Report on Digital Cooperation on ...

Cross-posted from ICT4Peace Foundation website. Originally published on 22 May 2019. ### Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited by the organisers of Point 8.0 in Sarajevo to participate in a panel discussion anchored to Tech, Fear and Accountability, featuring Victoire Rio and moderated by Stefania Koskova. The conversation was anchored to social media in general, ...

First posted on the ICT4Peace Foundation website. Features input given by me for Social Media companies and other key actors that fed into a document created for and tabled at the meeting held in Paris to launch the ‘Christchurch Call’. First published on 14 May 2019. ### The Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content ...

Reposted from the ICT4Peace Foundation website and published on 27 April 2019. ### On Easter Sunday, Sri Lanka was hit by devasting terrorist attacks across the country, claimed by ISIS some days later. The attacks killed over 250, and injured many hundreds more. Throughout the week, more arms caches, known associates of the suicide bombers and safe houses were ...

My Editor, and the general readership of this newspaper fall into a demographic that doesn’t quite understand the media landscape in Sri Lanka today. As long as this demographic doesn’t go on to propose and make laws or regulations that seek to govern for tens of millions what they cannot or do not understand, I empathise with their confusion ...

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook was in the news in New Zealand over a row with Privacy Commissioner John Edwards. The heated public exchange between Edwards and the company took place in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the private information of millions of Facebook users was harvested, illicitly, for deeply divisive, partisan and political ...

Coming out of a long meeting, the first I heard of the violence in Christchurch was from those in Sri Lanka who had got breaking news alerts. I was both very disturbed and extremely intrigued. Terrorism as popular theatre or spectacle is not new, and some academics would argue is a central aim of terrorists, who want their acts ...

Whether bound by country, city or community, the pulse of or, on Friday, the pain from a place like Christchurch can often be determined by the careful collection of social media updates published in the public domain. It is an interest in precisely this that brought me to New Zealand, where I study how Twitter and Facebook are integral ...

Our wait for a telephone was just a few years. At the time, in the early 90s, we knew of families who were on a waiting list for close upon a decade. I was at school when Sri Lanka Telecom had installed the rotary device. Like the first mobile phones from Motorola to hit Sri Lanka, the unit weighed ...

Anchored to my 2014 public lecture on digital archiving and archives, was invited by the English Department at the University of Colombo to deliver a presentation on the same topic, as part of a new research project anchored to digital humanities. Harking back to points from my 2014 lecture, I spoke on the transition in digital domains from history ...

Over lunch with Prof. Jayadeva Uyangoda last week, the conversation meandered into anecdotal capture of Sri Lanka’s new capitalism. We talked about snapshots of wealth and its generation, along with its public display through material goods, as distinct from even just a few years ago. Prof. Uyangoda spoke to what he thought were salient features of this new crass ...

A public lecture on archiving from a few years ago dealt with how I’ve developed an interest in preserving digital content – especially on social media – for posterity. The assumption many hold is that digital content never decays and that once online, on the web or indexed on Google, content never disappears or goes away. This is wrong ...

I was invited with colleagues from the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) to deliver a presentation on our research and motivations to a group of locals this week, assembled at the Mornington Methodist Church in Dunedin. The central challenge around presenting my doctoral research for many who are fearful or anxious about social media in the ...

This blog post should have come up much earlier than this, but Digana got in the way and in a way, resonating with what was discussed, esp. through a weaponisation of Twitter hitherto unseen in the kind of violence that gripped Sri Lanka in general, and Kandy in particular, that week. After Namal Rajapaksa, bots and trolls: New contours of ...