Social media for social justice campaigns

ICTs in general 2 Minutes

https://twitter.com/prabudeepan/status/462474135512154112

I delivered today, in Sinhala, a lecture on how to use social media for social justice campaigns for a group of volunteers from the STITCH Movement, aged between 16 – 30, from across Sri Lanka. The weekend retreat for these volunteers was held in Chilaw, and my submissions were also translated into Tamil.

I looked at how social media could aid social justice, volunteering and rights-based campaigns in Sri Lanka, whether they were youth, individual, community or institutionally driven. I noted that three factors contributed to the growth of social media use in general, and its use in rights campaigns in particular – the ubiquity of broadband for affordable tariffs, unlimited storage on the web for free or very low cost, and the rise of smartphones and tablets.

Slide 9 captured what social media had resulted in, which I said was fundamentally different to the world I grew up and indeed, first started to work as an activist in. Starting with Crowd Voice, I then flagged various apps, tools, platforms and websites that were commonly used by those in Sri Lanka to produce, disseminate and archive content, as well as highlight and debate various issues.

On Instagram for example, I noted @dronestagram, @everydaysrilanka and @srilankabaton as three key examples of accounts that were not run of the mill photos, but either in subject selection or curation, were designed to give insights or perspectives not easily obtained or observed.

I noted how this wasn’t some fringe group activity or marginal content – Kottu, the Sinhala Bloggers Union, Maatram, Vikalpa, Boondi were flagged as loci on the web to engage with content one couldn’t easily access through other mainstream media.

Covering the many ways social media could augment and enhance social justice movements and campaigns, I ended by warning against slacktivism, noting that just downloading these tools, or registering to use them on the web, didn’t automatically bring about the change desired. That architects of that change, I noted, were those I was speaking to. I didn’t have time to go deeply into issues of online safety and security, but I did flag content put out by UNICEF Sri Lanka on Facebook in this regard, which I am told will soon be available in Sinhala and Tamil as well.

For a short video, recorded by STITCH, around what I talked about today, click here.

Some relevant tweets from the sessions today follow.

https://twitter.com/prabudeepan/status/462537134440595456

https://twitter.com/prabudeepan/status/462475125422444544

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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