I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the ISCRAM Asia Conference 2014 held in Sri Lanka from 20 – 21 June 2014. My session was held at the University of Colombo’s School of Computing and was titled ‘The more the technology, the more it stays the same?’. Had my keynote been a week earlier, I would have begun ...
“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake” – Ralph Waldo Emerson In the early 80s, and the start of what would be a nearly 30-year brutal war, I was kept awake at night by two things. Planes and ambulances. With fresh military offensives by the Sri Lankan Army incurring heavy casualties, Airforce planes airlifted the dead and dying to ...
This article was originally published on the website of Institute for Human Rights and Business. ### The world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook, recently unveiled its human rights policy. It is a step in the right direction. But declaring a policy is one thing; implementing it is quite another. In a recent podcast with the Institute for Human Rights and Business, ...
On 14 April 2020, Sanjana Hattotuwa, an Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation had a conversation with Helena Puig Larauri, Co-founder and Director at Build Up over Skype, on issues anchored to two blog posts penned by Helena. Digital peacebuilding and the pandemic, Part 1 and Part 2, covers a range of issues impacting peacebuilding as a consequence of the ...
Was invited by Associate Professor SungYong Lee at NCPACS to deliver a guest lecture to his 2021 MA class on media’s role in peacebuilding violent conflict generation. Speaking first around the nature of my doctoral research over three years at the Centre, I covered the specific geographic, socio-political focus of my research and at a very high level, how I ...
Cross-posted from the ICT4Peace Foundation’s website. ### I was invited to take part in Tech Camp 2016, held at Phandeeyar, where I talked about and trained on mobile advocacy and activism strategies. Calling on the work engineered in Sri Lanka around election monitoring, civil society mobilisation, voter education and civic media, I talked about how mobiles were used to bear ...
First published on ICT4Peace Foundation website. Meaningful policymaking to fight the swelling seed, spread and supremacy of misinformation benefits from data and evidence alive to socio-political realities. A new report from Aotearoa New Zealand’s Classification Office does precisely this. ‘The Edge of the Infodemic’ presents a snapshot of the country’s media and information ecologies in addition to the risk of ...
Podcast with New Zealand’s Classification Office on the role of social media platforms both in terms of promoting incendiary content and how some have gone on to protect and strengthen democracy. Listen to the podcast here (Episode 7).
The Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit Regional office South Asia organized a regional seminar on “Promoting Liberty Digitally” in Sri Lanka from 15th to 17th October 2016. I was asked to speak on “Digital transformation and the role of Civil Society in Sri Lanka” and to be present at a group discussion on “Civil rights and the Internet”. My presentation ...
Updated the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) for official government websites I first created in November 2016. Access latest version here. Queries can be in Tamil, Sinhala or English. Deleted sites indexing former President Maithripala Sirisena & PM Ranil Wickremesinghe. Added the following websites to the CSE, http://www.mahindarajapaksa.lk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahinda_Rajapaksa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajapaksa_family https://twitter.com/PresRajapaksa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Got
Clearing the Decks After a Year of Reviews: Operationalizing Peace Operations Reform, organised by ZIF, the Centre for International Peace Operations, was held from 25 – 26 February just outside of Berlin. Agenda here. I was asked to make a presentation on New Technologies and New Media as it related to UN peacekeeping. The presentation can be found below, ...
Consultations around reconciliation post-war will invariably deal with memory, and contested historical records. It sounds counter-intuitive, but memory is in fact more about the future than it is about the past. If we lose access to content around what happened in the past and why, we lose the ability to create the future we want and risk repeating history. Not ...
Hosted by the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago, I curated a conference looking at the intersection of social media and democracy on 16 and 17 March 2021. Supported by the first of its kind partnership with Twitter in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the conference was the culmination of doctoral research into representations of ...
Cross posted from ICT4Peace Foundation site. ### Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, Sanjana Hattotuwa, in conversation with Marvin Hubbard from OAR FM Dunedin, looking at the issues around social media, hate, peace and democracy in Aotearoa/New Zealand and beyond. Broadcast live on OAR 105.4FM Dunedin on 23 March 2021. Original podcast at Community or Chaos programme’s website / podcast ...
What are “information disorders”? What impact do they have on conflict and other situations of violence? And how can humanitarians better understand them and mitigate their negative effects? Special Advisor of the ICT4Peace Foundation, Sanjana Hattotuwa, took part in a panel discussion on the impact of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech in the humanitarian sector. The discussion was organised ...
The event was aimed at journalists from the programme and also from outside, including the Sri Lanka College of Journalism, mainstream media, freelance journalists and civic media, around the ethical, rights based use of drones for journalism, also in compliance with the Civil Aviation Authority’s regulations from February 2016. Drone journalism: Where to now? from Sanjana Hattotuwa The Q&A session ...
Image courtesy Guardian As part of the New Ec(h)o systems: Democracy in the age of social media, Paul Ash, the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Cyber and Digital and Cyber Coordinator at Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet joined Special Advisor Sanjana Hattotuwa in a session titled ‘The Christchurch massacre and social media: Lessons learnt and ...
First reading Facebook released the company’s Human Rights Impact Assessment for Sri Lanka today. At the time of writing, Joshua Brustein writing for Bloomberg has one of the first takes on the report, highlighting Facebook’s apology for its role in Sri Lanka’s violence. Commissioned by Facebook, the report was conducted and written by Article One. As noted in the ...
Technology does not feel. It does not bleed. Its very insensitivity to trauma can be its strength – the tireless information sharing frameworks Info Share created knew no time of day and didn’t clamour for rest. On the other hand, because it is value neutral, technology lends itself to abuse. It cannot by itself create relief processes. No matter ...
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 ...
