Sri Lanka social media shutdown part of global discontent with Silicon Valley
Sri Lanka social media
shutdown part of global discontent with Silicon Valley
By Tony Romm April 23,
2019 — 5.54am
Washington: The Sri Lankan
government's decision to shutter access to social-media sites after Sunday's
deadly bombings may mark a turning point in how countries around the world
perceive Silicon Valley - and their willingness act to stop the spread of
falsehoods online.
A decade ago, Facebook,
Twitter and their social-media peers helped spearhead pro-democracy uprisings
that toppled dictators throughout the Middle East, and their services were seen
as a way to help in catastrophes, allowing authorities a vehicle to convey
crucial information and organise assistance.
Today, though, those same
social-media sites appear to some as a force that can corrode democracy as much
as promote it, spreading disinformation to an audience of millions in a matter
of minutes and fuelling ethnic violence before authorities can take steps to
stop it.
That sense is heightened
by tech giants' seeming inability to strike a balance between free expression
and protecting the public from harm.
"What happened
yesterday with the government shutting down access to social media is part of a
much larger picture that's happening all over the world," said Michael
Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a Washington-based think tank that
measures political rights and civil liberties globally. "There's much,
much more major effort by government to regulate the internet, to restrict
access to social media."
Authoritarian-leaning
countries have long worked to rein in social media when it challenged their
ability to control information. But over the last year, more democratic
governments have started to target social-media sites, considering new
regulations to stamp out disinformation during elections and to prevent their
use as rallying points for hatred and extremism.
Google and Twitter
declined to comment. Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for
comment Monday.
"People rely on our
services to communicate with their loved ones and we are committed to
maintaining our services and helping the community and the country during this
tragic time," Facebook said over the weekend.
In Sri Lanka, government
officials ordered the social-media blackout within hours after bombs exploded
in churches and hotels, killing nearly 300 people.
Before the mandate took
effect, researchers said they saw hoaxes spreading online that misidentified
those behind the attack and the total number of people killed.
It marked the second time
in as many years that Sri Lanka sought to prevent citizens from accessing
social media out of fear that misinformation could stoke ethnic unrest.
For a week in March 2018,
the government blocked access to Facebook and its apps, Instagram and WhatsApp,
along with the messaging app Viber, as they sought to curb hateful posts
against Muslims while riots spread across the central part of the country.
Government officials at
the time said that Facebook had "been used to destroy families, lives and
private property," and sharply rebuked the company for failing to act
swiftly to take down harmful content.
"I can't say whether
it's right or wrong, but it shows for sure the concern about misinformation in
this part of the world," said former FBI agent Clinton Watts, who studies
misinformation for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"The shutdown keeps
communication from accelerating misinformation and organising attacks," he
said. "Essentially the shut down might slow things down so authorities can
get a handle on what's happening before violence spins out of control."
In doing so, Sri Lanka
became the first country this year to shut down social media in response to a
national incident, said Alp Toker, the executive director of NetBlocks, a
London-based digital rights group that estimates there have been 60 incidents of
full or partial online shutdowns since 2015.
In general, Toker said
there is a "growing desire" on the part of governments to "have
the last say on whether social media is censored, blocked or restricted."
Strict restrictions long
have been in place in authoritarian countries, such as China, where Facebook
and Google remain banned. YouTube, meanwhile, has been periodically blocked in
more than two dozen countries since the service was founded nearly 15 years
ago, including an incident in 2007 when a Turkish court ordered the removal of
videos critical of the country's founder.
More recently, countries
such as Russia have sought to criminalise the spread of "fake news."
These laws can serve as a "pretext for enforcing against political
dissidents or journalists," said Emma Llanso, the director of the Centre
for Democracy and Technology's Free Expression Project.
In the United States,
social-media giants benefit from the First Amendment's guarantee that
government will keep its hands off speech. "The real solution is for
social media companies to do a better job in removing hate speech and not
allowing their platforms to incite violence," said Democratic
Representative Ro Khanna, who represents a portion of Silicon Valley.
But the desire to regulate
social media has gained global appeal, even in countries with strong
protections for free expression, due to Silicon Valley's recent missteps.
Meddling by Russian agents
on Facebook and Twitter helped divide the public during the 2016 presidential
election and Europe's Brexit campaign. Automated accounts, or bots, falsely
amplified online campaigns in an attempt to sow discord around sensitive
political topics.
Often, the consequences
have been deadly: The United Nations has linked hate speech on social media
including Facebook with the mass killings in Myanmar, and a top general long
had used the site to spread false information about the Rohingya, a Muslim minority
Myanmar authorities refuse to recognise as citizens.
A deadly attack on two
mosques in New Zealand last month illustrated that Facebook and Google continue
to struggle to take down harmful content.
Both sites' human
reviewers and artificial intelligence tools could not keep up with users who
sought to upload videos of the violent attack in the city of Christchurch. The
failings of these social-media sites prompted New Zealand to propose a sweeping
new law that would give regulators power to order the removal of harmful online
content - and tough fines for tech giants that fail to heed their warnings.
European governments have
offered similar proposals, introducing new laws targeting hate speech and proposals
to remove terrorist content.
Germany, meanwhile, began
implementing a tough online anti-hate speech law in 2018. A sweeping plan put
forward in the United Kingdom this month would impose steep fines and other
penalties for social-media sites that don't swiftly remove a range of offending
content, from violent videos to disinformation.
Tech giants have lambasted
the UK blueprint as a threat to users' ability to communicate unfettered
online.
"I think across the
world we've seen online material left unregulated for a considerable period,
and I think that's what we're seeking to remedy here," Jeremy Wright, the
UK secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, in a recent
interview.
"If we can put into
place a system of regulation that is sensible. . . we won't be the only country
to want to do that."
The global blowback
represents a landmark shift in political opinion nearly 10 years after experts
credited Silicon Valley with being a critical element of the Arab Spring.
In 2010, a Google employee
named Wael Ghonim catalysed the role social media would play in the
pro-democracy uprisings with a Facebook page he created to commemorate a fellow
Egyptian who had been killed by police.
The page, "We are all
Khaled Said," garnered hundreds of thousands of followers, and helped to
springboard the Tahrir Square protests that toppled the country's longtime
dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Top executives, including
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Eric Schmidt, used their stories to
justify their platforms as forces for democratic values, freedom, and global
good. Ghonim himself received a standing ovation during a company-wide town
hall at the time.
"It really put the
focus on the liberating qualities of technology," said Freedom House's
Abramowitz.
Those benefits haven't
dissipated, he said, and activists around the world continue to take advantage
of Silicon Valley's powerful social-media tools. But, he added: "In the
last number of years, there's been a greater focus on the detrimental side effects
on this explosion of technology."
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