The nature and nurture of disinformation

First published on the ICT4Peace Foundation website. ### For us the land is matrix and destroyer,Resentful, darkly knownBy sunset omens, low words heard in branches.— Poem in the Matukituki Valley, James K. Baxter “In the woods we return to reason and faith.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson Aotearoa New Zealand’s inaugural hui on countering terrorism and violent extremism, He …

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Addressing the Infodemic

First published on ICT4Peace Foundation website. Meaningful policymaking to fight the swelling seed, spread and supremacy of misinformation benefits from data and evidence alive to socio-political realities. A new report from Aotearoa New Zealand’s Classification Office does precisely this. ‘The Edge of the Infodemic’ presents a snapshot of the country’s media and information ecologies in …

Conversation with Gayan Prageeth

Spoke with Sri Lankan article Gayan Prageeth about his latest exhibition, Eyes Only - featuring a body of work with a narrative focused on the developments of politics and corruption in Sri Lanka post-war. https://soundcloud.com/user-635616592-684253190/open-studio-podcast Please note the podcast is in Sinhala. Download the English transcript here. See original post on the Saskia Fernando Gallery …

Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka

First published in Peace Chronicle, the mnagazine of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, Summer 2019. ### Write whatever makes sense to you, I was told. Though I understood the instruction, I struggled with its execution. The suicide bombings on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka massacred over 250 people. This included 45 children, or about …

What we are today

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Waiting for the Barbarians, C P Cavafy To condone the stoning of Muslims. To boycott their …

When a law is not the answer

Wonderful news said all the Sri Lankans. But why Queensland, all the Australians asked. Fifteen years ago, a Rotary World Peace Fellowship award offered seven universities around the world to undertake a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies. I chose the University of Bradford. I was awarded a place at the University of Queensland, in …

Principles over promises: Responding to the Christchurch terrorism

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook was in the news in New Zealand over a row with Privacy Commissioner John Edwards. The heated public exchange between Edwards and the company took place in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the private information of millions of Facebook users was harvested, illicitly, for deeply …

Pulse points

Whether bound by country, city or community, the pulse of or, on Friday, the pain from a place like Christchurch can often be determined by the careful collection of social media updates published in the public domain. It is an interest in precisely this that brought me to New Zealand, where I study how Twitter …

The infamy engines

Coming out of a long meeting, the first I heard of the violence in Christchurch was from those in Sri Lanka who had got breaking news alerts. I was both very disturbed and extremely intrigued. Terrorism as popular theatre or spectacle is not new, and some academics would argue is a central aim of terrorists, …

Terrorism in Aotearoa

Do you love New Zealand, asked the extremely inebriated young white man and his companion as they suddenly blocked my path at the Octagon, a few weeks after I arrived in Dunedin. Of all the people on the sidewalk at the time, I noticed they only followed me for a while. Not knowing quite how …