Online trouble-makers ordered to obey 48-hour cutoff

The National Election Commission has threatened presidential candidates and their supporters with legal action if they use social media in the 48 hours before election day on November 16.

Election Commissioner-General Saman Sri Ratnayake said the commission would either directly take legal action against an offender or support another candidate or group wishing to file a case against a protagonist trying to influence people through social media during the 48-hour cooling period.

He added that according to election regulations all election-related promotional activities should cease 48 hours prior to the election.

“We are currently monitoring social media activities and have planned to take down pages, websites and accounts that publish derogatory statements, misleading information, hate speech and material that insight violence,” he said.

Meetings on the matter had been held with regional representatives of social media companies Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

“We requested them to support us in the campaign against hate speech. They came to an agreement with us and agreed to take down posts and pages of those who post hateful posts that violate election regulations,” Mr. Ratnayake said.

He asks members of the public who spot possible election regulation violations on Facebook, Twitter, Viber and WhatsApp to contact the social media companies on contact numbers available on the commission’s website.

While these initiatives are underway, supporters of the presidential candidates have been active in propaganda on the net.

Facebook posts on editing pictures of candidates are strategically published. One post contained pictures of a candidate as a cartoon character while another had his rival candidate shown as a sci-fi movie character.

YouTube videos of famous singers recording songs with obscure meanings and vulgar ideas have appeared online, antagonising party members and supporters.

One singer dressed in women’s clothing makes degrading comments about politicians of a major party. Another YouTuber, along with other social media influencers, held a press conference claiming to be threatened by an artist who supports another political party.

All their content is still up on the website.

Traditional paper posters have become a thing of the past with most of the presidential candidates opting to use social media as their favoured platform.

The Centre for Monitoring election Violence (CMEV) expressed concern over social media being used during in the two days prior to voting.

CMEV National Coordinator Manjula Gajanayake said Facebook and other social media are open windows that would be exploited by candidates and their supporters during the last 48 hours.

“We are planning to monitor such activity and report it to the election commission but there is no-one to stop them from posting pictures and video and propaganda,” he said.

He said for the time being the candidates are maintaining their official Facebook and other social media accounts responsibly, without posting any hate speech or incitement of violence or racial disharmony.

He said the same could not be said of their supporters, who were attacking each other on the internet.

“Someone should stop this; such content with hate speech should not be allowed to be published in social media,” Mr. Gajanayake said.

The Executive Director of Free and Fair Elections, Rohana Hettiarachchie, said his organisation had begun monitoring social media monitoring from Thursday.

Mr. Hettiarchchie said one team would identify pages of the candidates and supporters and monitor their activities electronically. Some 15,000 sites are expected to come under scrutiny. The second team would manually monitor selected candidates and supporters’ social media accounts.

The President of the Information Technology Society of Sri Lanka, Rajeev Yaisu, said he had requested a meeting with the election commission and Facebook agents, saying around 19 election- related complaints have been reported.

“More than eight fake pages of candidates have been found while there were around 10 accounts that are used sling mud and discredit rival candidates,” he said.

Experts in computer science emphasised it was important for social media agencies to find mechanisms to understand memes, posts and write-ups posted in Sinhala and Tamil in order to regulate posts.

The head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Dr. Shehan Perera, said the university could help by developing tools on language identification to automatically regulate election-related content on social media.

He said hateful or violence-inciting content in the local languages was not as easily identified as it would be in the English language, so language processing could help ensure a fairer election.