YouTube for anger and activism in Sri Lanka

ICTs in general 1 Minute

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Largely on account of two short videos capturing reactions to the assassination of the Editor in Chief of the Sunday Leader and senior journalist Lasantha Wickremetunge in Sinhala and English, Vikalpa’s YouTube Channel was the 59th most viewed channel on YouTube yesterday. At the time of writing this post, the Sinhala video has been viewed 1,846  times and the English 1,249 times. 

This is the second time Vikalpa YouTube channel has entered the top 100 list on YouTube amongst Reporter’s Channel worldwide. The first was for its coverage commemorating the anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka in July 2008. 

It’s really horrible that it takes an event of such a tragic nature to propel our work higher in this list, but it does also demonstrate once again that short videos on YouTube in particular, and online video in general, can be a powerful platform for activism and advocacy. Videos on Vikalpa’s Channel have been viewed tens of thousands of times. Videos on a site I created to archive online 30 second spots commemorating the July 1983 riots that were produced for and first broadcast on TV have also generated thousands of views. 

Vikalpa’s YouTube video channel reaches and generates far more people and interest respectively than its website, which gets around 350 readers on average a day. This is significant in a country that does not enjoy good bandwidth (most of the viewers and readers are from Sri Lanka). It suggests that online video – especially short videos – can be are are re-distributed, cross-featured, emailed the links to, embedded, downloaded and copied and if their license allows it, re-worked and re-edited to create viral campaigns, including those on social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, that can meaningfully strengthen real world activism and advocacy against violence.

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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2 thoughts on “YouTube for anger and activism in Sri Lanka”

  1. Pingback: Global Voices Online » Sri Lanka: YouTube for activism
  2. Pingback: Vikalpa YouTube Channel in Top 100 list again « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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