Creating social justice initiatives online

ICTs in general 1 Minute

I was invited by Sri Lanka Unites to speak to a group of 25 students from 13 district at the Royal College auditorium today on the use of new and social media to strengthen social justice and democracy. I remain conflicted about SLU. On the one hand and prima facie, the failure of Beyond Borders in Sri Lanka to live up to its early potential and the absence of any other major youth movement on similar lines in Sri Lanka, SLU’s initiatives are commendable. On the other hand, their understanding of reconciliation glosses over deep-rooted and enduring systemic violence in Sri Lanka, linked to the political culture that is majoritarian and on many occasions, outright racist. To not acknowledge the incumbent government’s direct role in the erosion of democratic governance is to place reconciliation – as an idea and process – in a vacuum. This is not in any way to devalue the work SLU does, but to suggest that with a government that engineered the the 18th Amendment, partook in the monumental waste of food to celebrate the second term of a President, continue to force Tamils into submission, continue to treat them as somehow suspect, countenances violent attacks in broad daylight against Tamil MPs and supports a government whose senior ministers openly call the Tamil version of the national anthem a joke is really able to sustain any meaningful reconciliation is in my mind a stretch. The question is then how to foster reconciliation despite government, not with it. And this is where the potential of social and new media is most palpable.

I took up the invitation to speak because these students are our future. Sri Lanka’s education system – placing great emphasis on learning by rote and simple regurgitation – is an enemy of critical thinking, the basis of media literacy. Without media literacy, no amount of new media content production and dissemination alone with result in a stronger democracy. If only these students are inspired to continually – from every person and every media – ask ‘Why’, and based on the answers or silence in response, create their own media, I’ll be happy.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

Published