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) 
You have been real smart to phrase it as “Tamil Websites”; where as it is obvious the reason why these websites were blocked was not because they were “Tamil” but rather they were “LTTE” websites. It is clear your objective is to mislead your readers with a sense that, the GOSL is discriminating the Tamil people in Sri lanka, with acts like these. But the truth (Which you also know, but act as you don’t know) is, these websites are run by the LTTE supporters, and they use these websites to manage LTTE propeganda campaigns against the state of SRi Lanka, and to raise funds for the LTTE. You are not mentioning a single word about that, but simply putting it like a “language discrimination issue”.
You have the right to approve or delete this comment. That’s totally up to you, and I’m keeping a copy of my comment for future references.
BTW, they won’t block Groundviews 🙂 The hit count is too low to make an impact on LTTE fund raising!
Defence.lk and Army.lk, to name but two government run websites, have run sustained hate campaigns and are defined by their pro-Rajapakse propaganda, no better in intent, purpose and expression than pro-LTTE sites. Terrorist propaganda gets needless fuel from censorship.
They won’t block your site either. We need comic relief.
1.Blocking of these sites is useless till the proxy sites are available.
2.Don’t call those terror propaganda sites as Tamil web sites
3.I don’t find ViC’s blog as a comic relief!
@Sanjana Hattotuw – LTTE web sites? Why? Because you don’t like the news appear on that sites. Government doesn’t want you to know the other side of the story so blocked the sites.
Come on Guys. Come out of the shell. How long sinhala politicians are going to keep you in dark showing the Tamil ghost?…….One day all those dark forces you allowed to build with in you will turn against you.