Blogger arrested in Sri Lanka for “offensive” comments regarding President and Defense Secretary?

ICTs in general 1 Minute

The Daily Mirror web edition carries a story about a youth arrested by the Criminal Investigations Department and remanded till the 6th of November by the Matale Magistrate. The crime? Making “offensive” comments regarding the President and the Secretary of Defense on the web.

The newspaper has no further information on the individual, the nature of the “offensive” comments, or the language and location in which they were published.

The disturbing transition from banning pornography to open web censorship seems to have been made.

Update: 2nd November 2009

The Daily Mirror now confirms that the name is Gayan Rajapakse and that he was arrested on charges of having used the internet to threaten President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Again, no further information on the nature of the threat, or at which location it was published, and why this threat was taken more seriously than others which can be found on the web.

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 “Blogger arrested in Sri Lanka for “offensive” comments regarding President and Defense Secretary?”

  2. Pingback: The arrest of the ‘blogger’ in Sri Lanka: Crowd-sourcing trumps traditional media follow up « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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