Asanga Welikala, writing last week on the high-drama around the No Confidence Motion and its fallout, avers that “With hopes crushed and expectations laid low by exactly the substandard culture of parochial politics that the majority of Sri Lankans uniting across ethnic and religious divides hoped to fundamentally change in that nation-building moment of 2015, we now have a Government that is in office but not in power. As was seen in the local government elections, the electorate will punish the self-indulgence of division and in-fighting within government.”
Two points stand out in that excerpt. The fact that we now have a PM who clearly no longer controls, directly or through coalition congruence, all of government. There are many visible manifestations of this just last week, but the problem is longer in the making – the inevitable consequence of an insecure, myopic, self-centred President seeking the security of office even to the extent of reneging promises, and as Welikala flags, the unwillingness and inability of the PM and UNP to go about what was expected of them after January 2015.
The other point about electoral pushback and verdict is an interesting one, pegged to the result of the local government election in early February, projected into the future. Humour me. In last week’s column, I flagged the possibility, going by what happened in Digana alone, that Sri Lanka’s intelligence services may well have personal allegiances to those outside of government that impacts their professional assessment, analysis and reporting. A government that isn’t pre-warned, or is blind-sided by violence clearly engineered by a few, is one that cannot then take measures to contain, control, mitigate or prevent. Worse, as CCTV evidence indicates, elements of the Army and Police are openly in favour of and participating in the violence. We then have strikes, hitting Colombo’s traffic choke points, close to or during rush hour. This is all amplified online. During Digana, accounts on Twitter took to the production of content with no basis in fact, which was then spread wider by other accounts – a network effect that results in the spread of misinformation. Closer observers of the violence in Aluthgama did not see anything remotely akin to this. In 2014, Twitter and social media in general was the means through which the violence on the ground was reported to the world, at a time when mainstream media was largely barred from capturing the extent of it. These vectors are now weaponised to fulfil the aims of those who inflict physical harm. This is done in two ways. One, by the production, spread and engagement with content that is geared to inflame and incite. Two, by latching on to individuals and institutions providing timely updates, eye witness accounts, factual reporting and insight – attacking them as agents of violence or its promotion. This is achieved by individuals, using pseudonyms and in vast numbers, as well as by automated accounts, engineered to spread and amplify the output of those who want to clamp down on inconvenient truths. The net effect is that the information most vital to be heard, seen or acted upon, becomes lost or hard to find – this is sometimes called the signal to noise ratio. With just too much of noise, it becomes hard to tune into to the signals that provide trusted information or updates. It has, also over the longer term, a more disturbing impact.
By making the news and information landscape toxic, it results in distrust and scepticism of all news and media. This works in favour of those promoting misinformation, because in the absence of media or information literacy, those who push out the most amount of content are often the architects of what is consumed. Think of it like a flood, controlled by those who want to overwhelm rivulets of vital reporting. The smaller flows of information are overwhelmed and subsumed by a much larger, faster moving body of content. This makes it possible to construct new and often false realities, by misguiding or misdirecting the attention and energies of a young demographic whose window to the world, and politics, is primarily social media.
This is why something that went unreported by any mainstream media – the unprecedented growth of fake accounts on Twitter over just the past week – is important to flag. The fake accounts mostly featured Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala names. Some had names that were more Western. Many of the profiles had images stolen from others, including notably, one that was taken from Indian cricketing star Virat Kohli’s Facebook page. Others have images of young girls, often Caucasian. Most of the accounts were created in March, and haven’t tweeted even once, though they often follow hundreds of accounts. Academic Raymond Serrato from the outfit Democracy Reporting International recorded around 4,800 accounts created during the time the violence in Digana was raging on the ground. Some of those accounts tweeted (which included the retweeting of content first published by others) over 5,000 times. Two factors are noteworthy here. The age of the accounts and the sheer volume of content production. Think of it like a crèche, with thousands of babies all crying loudly and at the same time for attention. In the same space we have a few more mature voices trying to be heard above the din, with something important to say. It is not a scenario with odds stacked in their favour.
This is precisely what the weaponisation of social media does to public discourse, especially around ethno-political emergencies and within fragile democracies. It is also what can over the longer term be engineered to influence, by the production of content aiming to disrupt, deny or decry through great volume and repetition, the thinking and perception of an electorate over certain issues, individuals, institutions or processes. Buying this sort of influence through fake accounts on social media isn’t hard. Companies sell it for less than fifty US dollars. Combining it with older, well-proven strategies like strikes, demonstrations that can be engineered to result in violence, real world disruption and mainstream media propaganda isn’t that much harder either. The visible physical manifestations of breakdowns in governance leads to venting online, and engaging with angry fellow citizens over social media leads to greater impatience with and anger towards the incumbent government. It is a vicious cycle, with legitimate grievances exploited by a few for the parochial, partisan pursuit of power.
This is, in a sense, a new dynamic within an old problem. Welikala’s submission around the electoral response to division and in-fighting in government is not a new political phenomenon, and arguably is an enduring feature of any coalition government in its sunset phase. What’s new here – what we will see more of but today understand little around, what will be used against us but we aren’t prepared to critically discern or respond to – is the subtle, sustained manipulation of perceptions. There is no quick fix. Studies show that misinformation and falsehood travels, by order of magnitude, faster, farther and wider than fact, or content that seeks to correct misinformation in the public domain. Picking on and exacerbating existing socio-political, communal, ethnic, religious and economic faultiness in society, these sophisticated disruption blueprints will undermine trust and faith in government. All roads lead to authoritarianism as a better form of government. As the New York Timesrecently flagged around Putin in Russia, the exercise of power and control from one central authority is deemed preferable by many to the paralysis and visible lack of progress when democratic institutions or governance is entrusted with reform.
The spectrum of disruption noted here and much more besides, from the physical to the digital, will have lasting effects on our society and politics. My fear is that those who cheer on and support pioneering architects of all this today are starting down a path that can only end up in a form of government that is deeply insecure about the very means through which it came to power. This insecurity has political and institutional manifestations we are all acutely familiar with from 2005 to 2015. My fear is thus not just the return of who was once in power. It is about what kind of politics, public discourse, electorate and government we invest in, inherit and inhabit moving forward, no matter which party or politician we vote for.
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First published in The Sunday Island, 8 April 2018.
Sanjana Hattotuwa 