The first social media blackout to be implemented in Sri Lanka since the inception of Social media platforms in 2005 just ended last week. The sudden and swift social media blackout was a response to halt and mitigate the spread of racial tensions among Sinhala and Muslim communities based on isolated incidents in Digana and Teldeniya. 
The social media blackout created a major socio, political and economic backlash targeting the government, representatives of various political parties including the two governing parties, civil society activists, professionals to foreign diplomats highlighted circumventions of democratic rights of Sri Lankans by denying them access to the services of social media platforms.
The Sri Lankan government confronted a full blown reality that academics/researchers such as this author has been trying hard to highlight throughout the last decade of the importance of grasping Cyber Political drifts that the world is encountering from domestic to global political processes. Stratsight in many occasions have engaged with various aspects of cyber politics over the last year.
Political processes, political strategies and decision making in the 21st Century have to be contingent upon the revolutions of technological disruptions. The master disruptor has been the Internet and its spatial element cyber space. No country, no statesman or woman is immune from cyber repercussions. A major reason Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential election was her handling of the Benghazi crisis 2012, in which violent protests in Libya led to the death of the US Ambassador in Libya. The key driver of the protest was an unrated, independent movie made by a US movie maker which went viral on YouTube, following claims it offended and the American government underestimated the global impact of this video.
Cyber Politics
Cyber Politics has emerged as a discipline of study and research over the last ten years exploring how internet and cyberspace have created multiple forms of power relationships that impact macro level statecraft to micro level political organizations. Yet this sub discipline remained largely on the peripheries of politics and International relations. Since the Arab Uprisings of 2011, increasing internet controls in countries like China, cyber-attacks , and finally the circumstances of allegation of Russian involvement mainly through cyber operations in the US presidential elections of 2016 has brought to discussion to the mainstream in Cyber political research and discussions.
Irrespective of what hard power spectrum a country belongs to, the cyber vulnerabilities have had major effect on Democratic societies. The very fundamental of democratic societies is freedom of information, speech, ideas and political freedoms, thus using cyber space and aligned technologies all these fundamental features of a democratic system has become vulnerable to cyber attacks and large scale disinformation campaigns.
-
The next social media revolt may not be stopped by merely pulling the plug
-
Cyber Politics has emerged as a discipline of study and research over the last decade
-
Sri Lanka’s response to contain the distasteful and destructive hate speech was a total shut down
-
China began its Internet filtering and controlling efforts at the turn of the Millennia
Weaponized Narratives
In the aftermath of US presidential elections a new study area has emerged in cyber political studies, the key concept is Weaponized Narratives. Multiple definitions have emerged to complement the concept, rather than going through the definitions, the key elements of weaponized narratives are the deliberate targeting of a society, to undermine its values, beliefs, create confusion and complexity and critically leading to alter political decisions at crucial moments such as in times of a 
democratically contested elections
In the previous Stratsight column, in generating a cyber strategy for Sri Lanka, the importance of people were highlighted. The weaponized narratives targets people and their judgements, thus it is a more powerful weapon than any form of kinetic attack. There is less coercion but alteration of convictions. Whilst propaganda campaigns of the past in global and domestic politics may have been a precursor to this, cyber space has enabled weaponized narratives to be packaged and delivered parallel to geo-political conflicts and to gain political advantage across national and international spectrum.
Harvard University’s main International Relations think tank the Belfer Centre initiated a project led by Eric Rosenbach the former election campaign boss of Republican Candidate Mitt Romney who ran against Obama in 2012 to lead a new research plus policy initiative called ‘Defending Digital Democracy’ last year. The core principal behind this new initiative is to prevent third countries or non-state actors of hacking and changing outcomes of political processes in the United States as well as other democratic countries highlighting the importance of understanding and responding to cyber political developments globally.
Sri Lanka’s choices
Sri Lanka’s response to contain the distasteful and destructive hate speech was a total shut down, while the move is debatable, but its long term effect will taper off with more and more users finding ways and means to circumvent the embargo. While VPNs remain a primary way of scaling up any state imposed firewall thus leading the State to invest more into advanced and sophisticated surveillance and fire walls.
China is the best case study in perfecting a firewall that is hard to breach and is becoming extremely sophisticated with a multimillion dollar investment in modernizing its technological architecture. China began its Internet filtering and controlling efforts at the turn of the Millennia. The project was codenamed ‘Golden Shield’, the more popular term that is used to identify China’s internet controls is ‘Great Firewall of China’. What it has achieved technologically is to move away from simple generalized content control when information enters China to a more potent surveillance capability targeting individual users.
Sri Lanka may not have the necessary technological backbone, the political will or deep pockets to go for such large scale surveillance which actually defeats the legitimacy of a democratic society. Yet there may be a lesson that can be learnt from China on why its internet censorship is to a certain extent accepted by its public. China has not taken a narrow approach of merely controlling the internet by simply curtailing it or expanding pervasive surveillance it has also managed to achieve a large scale social engineering operation where Chinese citizens have adopted a culture of self-censorship in
online activities.
Recent reports from China point to a promotion of new level of self-censorship in online activity as the state is exploring of the creation of a ‘Citizen Score’ as an incentive encouraging good behaviour. While Sri Lanka may not be in the mid to long term successful in popularizing self-censorship protocols but the State can look at creating awareness and supporting social media advocates, web journalists disseminate ideas of ethical use of social media. Rather than a state imposed code of conduct which always denote negativity a more publicly open dialogue promoting social media norms if given correct leadership and participation may lead to a more responsible social media behaviour among our citizenry.
What Sri Lankan policy makers have to be aware of is that the current increase of weaponization of social media and disinformation campaigns of social media reflects the times we live in. There is a massive recession in power and acceptance of the liberal world order. The value systems that were built of truth and justice are eroding or under attack. Philosophically we are entering a time of the Post-Truth, and the social media has become the production house of lies. Researchers claim that lies tend to get shared or consumed more in social media platforms and people are more attracted to lies of false information as there is novelty in it as the truth remain unexciting and stale.
Translating such social and political developments when making national policies, addressing issues of social cohesion and national security, it’s the right time for Sri Lanka to engage in a dialogue on how cyber politics and cyber cultures will change the traditional way of doing things, the sooner we have the conversation safer our social fabric will be. The next social media revolt may not be stopped by merely pulling the plug.
The writer is the Director, Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS)
