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.

Comments

Time to block them all

[mveloso]

It's funny, the social networks have gotten to the point where they can disrupt a society more than they can help it. Time to shut them all down and start again.

Re:Time to block them all

[evanh]

Agreed. No rules (global reach) + commercial = "wild-west"

Re:Time to block them all

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Time to block them all

[jellomizer]

The problem isn't social networks, but foreign actors who abuse their flaws.

Lets use social media to setup a Protest against Policy X and try to get all the people who are fervently against it to show up. At the same time with a different login name setup a Protest in the same spot strongly supporting Policy X get as many people fervently for it to show up too. If they are lucky it will cause violence. The country doesn't care about Policy X, only that it is contentious and easy to manipulate people to go out and be fervent on their cause.

Moderate views are getting tuned out, because the extreme voices are being picked up and amplified.

Lets go to Teenagers eating Tide Pods. They are old enough to know better, however their persona is to be the person who goes to the extreme, because this causes them to get attention. So to show how brave and extreme they are they will put Tide pods in their mouth. We have seen this behavior in the past before social media, with kids drinking until wasted and proudly state how wasted they were the previous night.

Being now there is an audience for your view point, whatever one it is to be. If you go Extreme you will get a solidify audience. While a moderate response, will get a tepid response, because people will need to parse out for themselves what they like and don't like about a particular view point, and cannot fall back on a binary, they are with more or they arn't

Re:Time to block them all

[barc0001]

An alternative to blocking them: Requiring actual names and user registrations. Every account links back to a real person and their real name is beside every post. No more bots, no more offshore Texans from Russia.

Dating myself, but back in Ye Olde Days of BBSs, you had to apply and the SysOp would call you to verify your information before activating your account on their system. We used pseudonyms but the SysOp had a list of who everyone really was, and if someone acted like an ass on the message board or online games, the banhammer came. It tended to keep things relatively civil.

Re:WhatsApp?

[JaredOfEuropa]

People (protesters, rioters, whatever) often mobilize and coordinate using Whatsapp groups. A lot easier than email or SMS.

The benefits of diversity!

[Hal_Porter]

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

Re:The benefits of diversity!

[Kiuas]

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.

If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again. Germany has had such laws in the books long before the current refugee crisis, up to the point that using nazi-symbolism is punishable by law, as is denying the holocaust. These laws prohibiting 'incitement of violence' or hatred against ethnic grouops have been on the books for decades, the recent law regarding social media is just the latest development. Even prior to the passage of the law, someone posting hate speech online could be fined in Germany and elsewhere, the only thing that the law changed was make it possible for the platforms to be fined for failing to remove such content.

Now granted, the recent influx of refugees has made the situation a lot more heated, but the general point is that Germany has been using censorship and hate-speech laws to control the (mostly) far-right groups in the country long before the last couple of years.

Note that this is not to say I agree with their laws, I think they're hastily implemented and essentially make the problem worse, not better. But the general point is that this sort of attitude within Germany (as well as other European countries) is not something they just recently came up with. The 2nd world war left its mark on the law(s) in many places, including here in Finland, Austria, Ireland and the UK.

Re:The benefits of diversity!

[Kiuas]

You miss the point where those laws were not enforced because they weren't necessary.

This is simply not true. There have been hate speech convictions in Germany and elsewhere prior to the current refugee crisis. A Finnish far-right politician whose only talking point throughout the years has been opposing immigration got sentenced to fines for calling all muslims pedophiles way back in 2012. Here's a story of a drunk neo-Nazi being fined for doing the Hitler salute in 2011. Etc, you can find many more examples using google.

Again, do I agree with these laws? No. Do I agree with the far-right? No, but saying that these laws have never been used before is simply not true.

Re:The benefits of diversity!

[Hal_Porter]

Care to elaborate why it should be banned?

Re: What is hate speech and who defines it?

[Nidi62]

In this particular case, a Buddhist man died so Buddhists are rioting and have burned down numerous mosques and Muslim owned shops and houses. Sri Lanka is not long removed from a pretty intense 25 year civil war between the Tamil minority and buddhist government. The Tamils are mostly Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. So Sri Lanka has a bit of a history of violence and oppression towards non-buddhists.

Re:Religion

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It almost is already, it's just that the DSM writers have been very careful to exclude the results of brainwashing of children.

Temporary block

[gopla]

This is a common practice in this part of the world. A temporary blockage of social media for 1-2 days, usually restricted to just a district or a city is common in India.

It is employed when the law enforcing agencies are caught unaware about some sudden flashpoint that triggers street violence. This blockage stops spreading of violence to larger area and give time to enforcement agencies to mobilize their resources

It is not to be confused with censorship or blanket ban of internet / social media forever. Over all it has a positive impact in preventing larger scale destruction of life and properties for cost of inconvenience of few days.

Sure it is

[argStyopa]

Hmm, a government faced with civil disturbances decides to block social media "to curb hate speech"?

Right.

Re:Sure it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Since these civil disturbances have led to people being killed: Yes, there is hate speech to curb, and yes these measures at least help.

At least it is better than the 'lala-can't-hear-you' policy that the government used in the past.

State of emergency

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: They say Christians are haters ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whitehouse.gov

Censorship is evil, period

[bradley13]

When talking about elections, Stalin reputedly said: "It's not who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes". Whenever one of these "hate speech" articles come up, I think of something similar: It's not the hate speech that matters; it's who gets to define what hate speech is.

I live in Europe, where the equivalent to the American 1st Amendment is ridiculously watered down. The European equivalent says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. ... The exercise of these freedoms ... may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for..." and the list of exceptions continues...

Which means: Just like in Sri Lanka, European governments can restrict your speech based on the ruling elite's ideas of necessity, safety and morals. Which basically means that they can restrict any damned thing they please.

Censorship is evil. Speech may be uncomfortable, it may be offensive, but there are very, very few situations where it should be restricted.

Re:Religion

[DickBreath]

Religion is the only way to bring healing to a world deeply and violently divided by religion.

Re: What is hate speech and who defines it?

[Nidi62]

So Sri Lanka has a bit of a history of violence and oppression towards non-buddhists.

I agree with the history of civil strife in Sri Lanka. However in this case it is the government ( mostly Buddhist) that is doing its best to stop spread of violence, hence the blame on Buddhists is unjustified.

The Buddhist government is from all appearances trying to protect the Muslims, so yes, they aren't to blame. But a segment of the Buddhist population is still rioting and committing violence so the blame towards those Buddhists is justified.