Lists of the best Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka

ICT for Peacebuilding 1 Minute

After incorporating Twitter’s @Anywhere functionality to Groundviews, I was inspired create two lists of Twitter accounts I follow on a regular basis. The first was a list of the best Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka, currently featuring 14 feeds.

The second was a list of the best Twitter accounts by Sri Lankan bloggers, currently featuring 15 feeds.

The lists are not meant to be comprehensive, nor do they include accounts with only occasional or peripheral references to Sri Lanka. Best, of course, is a subjective judgement. For example, the list of the Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka are updates I follow daily, and importantly, trust.

The list of bloggers on the other hand are not all those I follow daily, or agree with content of. But as noted on Groundviews, these Twitter feeds feature updates ranging from the quirky and personal to the incisive and political. Oftentimes, tweets from these bloggers will reveal issues, facets, processes and situations that go unreported or under-reported in mainstream media. They are not always tweets I trust, but often offer story ideas, inspiration or at the very least, a good laugh.

One hopes mainstream media in Sri Lanka catches up with innovative ideas like curated Twitter feeds to leverage social networking’s potential for journalism.

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.

Published

One thought on “Lists of the best Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka”

  1. Pingback: Global Voices in English » Sri Lanka: Notable Twitter Accounts

Comments are closed.