Global blowback
Sri Lanka’s social media shutdown illustrates governments’ discontent with Silicon Valley.
The Sri Lankan Government’s decision to shutter access to social media sites after Sunday’s deadly bombings may mark a turning point in how countries perceive Silicon Valley – and their willingness to act to stop the spread of falsehoods online.
A decade ago, Facebook, Twitter and their social media peers helped spearhead pro-democracy uprisings that toppled dictators throughout the Middle East.
Their services were also seen as a way to help in catastrophes, allowing authorities a vehicle to convey crucial information and organise assistance.
Today, however, those same socialmedia sites appear to some as a force that can corrode democracy as much as promote it, spreading disinformation to an audience of millions in a matter of minutes and fuelling ethnic violence before authorities can take steps to stop it.
That sense is heightened by tech giants’ seeming inability to strike a balance between free expression and protecting the public from harm.
‘‘What happened yesterday with the government shutting down access to social media is part of a much larger picture that’s happening all over the world,’’ says Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a Washington-based think tank that measures political rights and civil liberties globally. ‘‘There’s much, much more major effort by government to regulate the internet, to restrict access to social media.’’
Authoritarian-leaning countries have long worked to rein in social media when it challenged their ability to control information. But over the past year, more democratic governments have started to target social media sites, considering new regulations to stamp out disinformation during elections and to prevent their use as rallying points for hatred and extremism.
Google and Twitter declined to comment. Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday. ‘‘People rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones and we are committed to maintaining our services and helping the community and the country during this tragic time,’’ Facebook said during the weekend.
In Sri Lanka, government officials ordered the social-media blackout within hours of bombs exploding in churches and hotels, killing nearly 300 people.
Before the mandate took effect, researchers said they saw hoaxes spreading online that misidentified those behind the attack and the total number of people killed.
It marked the second time in as many years that Sri Lanka sought to prevent citizens from accessing social media out of fear that misinformation could stoke ethnic unrest. For a week in March last year, the government blocked access to Facebook and its apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, along with the messaging app Viber, as it sought to curb hateful posts against Muslims while riots spread across the central part of the country.
Government officials at the time said Facebook had ‘‘been used to destroy families, lives and private property’’, and rebuked the company for failing to act
swiftly to take down harmful content.
‘‘I can’t say whether it’s right or wrong, but it shows for sure the concern about misinformation in this part of the world,’’ says former FBI agent Clinton Watts, who studies misinformation for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
‘‘The shutdown keeps communication from accelerating misinformation and organising attacks. Essentially the shutdown might slow things down so authorities can get a handle on what’s happening before violence spins out of control.’’
In doing so, Sri Lanka became the first country this year to shut down social media in response to a national incident, says Alp Toker, executive director of NetBlocks, a London-based digital rights group that estimates there have been 60 incidents of full or partial online shutdowns since 2015.
In general, Toker says there is a ‘‘growing desire’’ by governments to ‘‘have the last say on whether social media is censored, blocked or restricted’’.
Strict restrictions have long been in place in authoritarian countries, such as China, where Facebook and Google remain banned. YouTube, meanwhile, has been periodically blocked in more than two dozen countries since the service was founded nearly 15 years ago, including an incident in 2007 when a Turkish court ordered the removal of videos critical of the country’s founder.
More recently, countries such as Russia have sought to criminalise the spread of ‘‘fake news’’. These laws can serve as a ‘‘pretext for enforcing against political dissidents or journalists’’, says Emma Llanso, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project.
In the United States, social media giants benefit from the First Amendment’s guarantee that government will keep its hands off speech. ‘‘The real solution is for social media companies to do a better job in removing hate speech and not allowing their platforms to incite violence,’’ says Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who represents a portion of Silicon Valley.
But the desire to regulate social media has gained global appeal, even in countries with strong protections for free expression, due to Silicon Valley’s recent missteps. Meddling by Russian agents on Facebook and Twitter helped divide the public during the 2016 presidential election and Europe’s Brexit campaign. Automated accounts, or bots, falsely amplified online campaigns in a bid to sow discord around sensitive political topics.
Often, the consequences have been deadly: the United Nations has linked hate speech on social media including Facebook with the mass killings in Myanmar, and a top general long had used the site to spread false information about the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that Myanmar authorities refuse to recognise as citizens.
The deadly attack on two mosques in Christchurch last month illustrated that Facebook and Google continue to struggle to take down harmful content. Both sites’ human reviewers and artificial
intelligence tools could not keep up with users who sought to upload videos of the violent attack. The failings of these socialmedia sites prompted New Zealand to look at new laws that would give regulators power to order the removal of harmful online content – and allow tough fines for tech giants that fail to heed their warnings.
European governments have offered similar proposals, introducing new laws targeting hate speech and proposals to remove terrorist content. Germany, meanwhile, began implementing a tough online anti-hate speech law last year. A sweeping plan put forward in the UK this month would impose steep fines and other penalties for social media sites that do not swiftly remove a range of offending content, from violent videos to disinformation. Tech giants have lambasted the UK blueprint as a threat to users’ ability to communicate unfettered online.
‘‘I think across the world we’ve seen online material left unregulated for a considerable period, and I think that’s what we’re seeking to remedy here,’’ Jeremy Wright, the UK secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said in a recent interview.
‘‘If we can put into place a system of
regulation that is sensible . . . we won’t be the only country to want to do that.’’
The global blowback represents a landmark shift in political opinion nearly 10 years after experts credited Silicon Valley with being a critical element of the Arab Spring.
In 2010, Google employee Wael Ghonim catalysed the role social media would play in the pro-democracy uprisings with a Facebook page he created to commemorate a fellow Egyptian who had been killed by police. The page, ‘‘We are all Khaled Said’’, garnered hundreds of thousands of followers, and helped to springboard the Tahrir Square protests that toppled the country’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Top executives, including Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt, used their stories to justify their platforms as forces for democratic values, freedom, and global good.
‘‘It really put the focus on the liberating qualities of technology,’’ says Freedom House’s Abramowitz.
Those benefits haven’t dissipated, he says, and activists continue to take advantage of Silicon Valley’s powerful social media tools. But, he adds: ‘‘In the last number of years, there’s been a greater focus on the detrimental sideeffects on this explosion of technology.’’ –
‘‘What happened with the [Sri Lankan] government shutting down access to social media is part of a much larger picture that’s happening all over the world.’’
Michael Abramowitz president of Freedom House