Published by Sanjana
An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance.
I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002.
I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents.
Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs.
Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts.
I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.
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ICT for Peacebuilding (#ICT4Peace) 
so now we are Iran?
way to go folks.
Yako Dayan,
We may be worse.
Amongst other things, in Iran I doubt you have morons disguised as Government MPs who storm into State broadcasting facilities, Police who try to abduct journalists or hold journalists in custody without any charge, a regime that shuts down media houses and stifles critical voices, openly says it wants to hack websites, blocks others, a Defense Secretary who calls up and threatens senior Editors (and issues bogus VISAs, but I guess being at the front lines of diplomacy, you wouldn’t know too much about what happens back home) and openly says that if he were President, he would be in favour of stronger censorship or senior Government Ministers and Public Servants who shoot their mouth off on media freedom and openly threaten media personnel.
And this isn’t even taking into account that which the LTTE and TMVP are responsible for in the North and East of Sri Lanka over the years, which for some odd reason, are facts more publicised by the Government.
But then again, you did find Russia under Putin to be spiffy, so I guess things in Sri Lanka’s problems with media pale into insignificance. Here’s an idea – maybe the “mission with a Mission” can do a piece on this. Shaggedelic baby, yeah!
Sanjana
Even in the United States, bloggers have faced challenges in exercising freedom of speech:
http://thizndat.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-am-kathleen-freedom-of-speech.html