Something Radically Wrong

The debate on the ban on social media is not so black and white. The ban itself was not black or white. Our reactions to it, however, was where we showed the least degree of humanity

The ban on social media was not the enemy. The enemy is the racism that we allow to remain on the streets, burning one shop after the other

It is not limited to the systematic racism and sexism that we unwittingly engage in on a daily basis. It is not even limited to the lack of substantive education, the reasoning expected of people beyond the achievement of literacy.

The wrongs of our country were instead brazenly laid bare in our collective reactions to the ban on social media, in the wake of the events in Digana and Teldeniya.
I need to dispel any  misrepresentations of my opinion, at this juncture. I am a millennial, who was able to exercise the right to franchise for the first time on the 10th of February. I say this because there is an oversimplification of the arguments for and against the ban; in that its proponents are labelled as relics of a bygone era clinging to the values of an old society, who do not understand the need for social media in a modern democracy, and its opponents, the liberal academics of a Western-leaning Colombo, who focus on the normative over the positive.

The debate on the ban on social media is not so black and white. The ban itself was not black or white. Our reactions to it, however, was where we showed the least degree of humanity.

What needs to be realized is that the ban was the need of the hour. Anyone who spends any substantial amount of time on Facebook knows just how many pages dedicated to nationalism and religious supremacism exist.

What this further indicates is the often implicit approval of such material in Sri Lanka. Any person’s social circle will have at least a single individual who either subscribes to this ideology or does not outright condemn the racist agenda that gripped the country in a vice on March 5

That is not a subjective observation. That is a fact. Any individual newsfeed will have, whether by actual association or a friend’s like/react/comment/share, the content of such pages. What this indicates is the scale to which social media is saturated with the inflammatory material in Sri Lanka, at the very least on Facebook.

What this further indicates is the often implicit approval of such material in Sri Lanka. Any person’s social circle will have at least a single individual who either subscribes to this ideology or does not outright condemn the racist agenda that gripped the country in a vice on March 5.

The ban on social media was not an attack on the freedom of expression. It was in its action, if not the intention, the preservation of the right to life. In a day and age where information goes viral in moments, without any confirmation of its veracity, how much misinformation would have been spread around the country? Ampara’s embers were not even put out before events unfolded in the Hill Country. We would have seen emboldened rioters in all corners of the island.

At the least, the political discussion of whether the ban was legitimate or not was still built on the bedrock of calling out the rioters for what they were: racists proliferating and acting on hate speech in the country. What makes the worst of us seem real, however, is that a great many people were more concerned about their inability to access social media, over the events in Kandy.

People have had their livelihoods, their memories, their very way of life, burnt to ashes. If not for the ban, a great many of those people may have burnt to ash themselves. And yet the fury of many people was directed at the perceived threat to their Instagram stories, their Snapstreaks, and their meme pages.

When did we foster such apathy in our country? How could we begin to care so little for people who are conceivably only a three-hour car drive away from us? How could anyone who has ever made friends with a Muslim, studied with a Muslim, or taken the time to not eat in front of a Muslim who is fasting, not find the courage and the integrity to stand up for them, when their world seems to be catching fire?

The Muslims have lived in our country for longer than racism has been institutionalized in our culture.

Yet, what is seen is a desire to sweep everything that has happened under the rug, and continue on with our lives in the ‘normalcy’ we were in before the ban was put in place.

People have had their livelihoods, their memories, their very way of life, burnt to ashes. If not for the ban, a great many of those people may have burnt to ash themselves

The ban on social media was not the enemy. The enemy is the racism that we allow to remain on the streets, burning one shop after the other.

We cannot begin to make a single thing different if we do not try to act against those root causes of extremism in our country. Racism does nothing for us. It simply provides an inexhaustible outlet for our frustration, again and again. We cannot give into a herd mentality, and that begins with each of us. If social media is the price of self-awareness, then please, charge its taxes. Maybe that will make us notice.