Tamilnet accessible once more from Sri Lanka?
March 8, 2009
As suddenly and mysteriously as it was taken off, Tamilnet.com is accessible once more from my SLT ADSL connection this evening. Perhaps the boffins at the MoD forgot to send their weekly memo to ISPs asking them to block the site?
Tamilnet has been inaccesible over any wired or wireless Internet connection from all ISPs in Sri Lanka since June 2007, though it briefly came back online in December 2007.
Update 10th March 2009: Guess someone sent the memo again...
Planning for when the cloud goes down…
March 8, 2009
USA Today reporting the Gmail crash on 25 February 2009
Computers will crash. The cloud, which runs on computers, will crash.
Once you realise this, planning for when the cloud does go down becomes just another way of ensuring business continuity. I’ve covered this in a post I wrote when WordPress.com went down.
Bearing witness to War: Five years of the war in Iraq
November 14, 2008
Bearing witness to the atrocities, brutality and embedded humanity in war is difficult. Embedded journalism is fraught with challenges and even projects like Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone faced problems of continued support for sustained coverage.
In this context comes a compelling website from Reuters, documenting 5 years of a tragic war in Iraq. Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War documents in through an interactive timeline, maps and other multimedia, facets of war and life in Iraq after the US led invasion of the country in March 2003. There are some disturbing, viscerally compelling images here by Goran Tomasevic.
There is, and never can be, any single source or definitive account of a war. Efforts such as this however, through captivating visuals and an interactive narrative, pull in viewers to critically look at a brutal, useless war that we have long since normalised.
Closer to home, and we will never find photographic evidence of this nature on our own on-going war. More accurately, photos taken for propaganda exclude more than they seek to explore or highlight. There is a qualitative difference between Goran’s photos and those on TRO’s Flickr stream, the Sri Lankan Army website or those featured in any number of Sinhala and Tamil diaspora sites that exclusively feature the brutality of the ‘other’, but never the consequences of one’s own violence.
Censored – Forum theatre on freedom of expression at a time of war
November 13, 2008
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirise all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.”
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
It’s the first time I’ve written on theatre on this blog, and with good reason. Censored, a forum theatre production by Beyond Borders in association with the British Council, will take to the stage on the 20th of this month.
Watch it. Participate in it.
Censorship has been with us ever since the production of knowledge, and it certainly won’t go away. The internet and web were supposed to emancipate us from shackles of parochialism and ignorance, and to an extent have. However, governments, non-state actors and today, even Internet Service Providers, constantly find new ways and new reasons to curtail and block information flows.
From burning ’satanic Harry Potter‘ books, to the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, from the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 in England to more recent moves in Sri Lanka to censor information on the internet and mobiles, polity and society everywhere has grappled with the free production of information and the maintenance of public order, national security, morals et al.
In Sri Lanka, the Rajapakse regime censors every way they can, everything they can, as often as they can – beginning at Sri Lanka’s borders and extending to TV, websites and war reporting. But censorship in Sri Lanka isn’t a new phenomenon. As Asanga Welikala, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives (and close friend of this author) notes in A State of Permanent Crisis: Constitutional Government, Fundamental Rights and States of Emergency in Sri Lanka:
In May and June 1958, in Ceylon, occurred what were up till then the most serious communal riots in Sri Lanka’s troubled history of ethnic relations. In retrospect, the events of 1958 were mere portents of the horrors that were to come. A contemporaneous journalistic account of what happened was written by Tarzie Vittachi, editor of Asia’s oldest newspaper, the Ceylon Observer, satirical columnist, and intrepid political commentator. In the context of the blanket censorship imposed under Sri Lanka’s first post-independence experience of emergency rule, the manuscript was published in London under the title Emergency ’58 by Andre Deutsch, in what has now become a classic of Sri Lankan political literature. The book was banned in Ceylon, and Tarzie Vittachi subsequently left the country, under the cloud of death threats.
The issue of censorship recently came to a head with the Private Television Broadcasting Station Regulations introduced by the Rajapakse regime. Overbroad, ill defined and outrageously conflating technical standards and concepts such as IP TV with video over the internet, with no definition of broadcast and with for reason other than to clamp down on dissent and criticism of the Rajapakse regime, journalist Namini Wijedasa was spot on when she said that the regulations placed media at the mercy of idiot ministers.
The regulations have a particularly sinister bent, in that they can be used by the regime as well as by ISPs (fearful of losing their broadcast license) to censor video over the internet, which affects all bloggers in Sri Lanka whether they produce video content themselves or wish to consume content on sites such as YouTube.
The freedom of expression is by no means an absolute right. One finds in European and American jurisprudence, particularly with regard to the interpretation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights by the European Court of Human Rights and the First Amendment of the American Constitution by the US Supreme Court respectively, a healthy debate on the freedom of the press and the freedom of expression. My own interest in the issue comes from the perspective of communicative rights, that all peoples have a right to access and participate in the creation of a wide and diverse range of information and views.
Sri Lanka is far removed from a country able to discuss, openly and meaningfully, what freedom of expression really means and why it is important to safeguard and strengthen even when dealing with terrorists and terrorism. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted
“Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war…Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.”
If I have a gripe, it is that the performance is only slated for a single night. Given the monumental challenges facing the freedom of expression in Sri Lanka, I encourage the producers to consider staging Censored again, and importantly, staging it out of Colombo and the Western Province.
IT Security: Planning for the lack of commonsense
June 1, 2008
Last week I captured through my mobile phone camera the user account, password and URL of a confidential human rights monitoring and advocacy database. The users had plastered these details on a public notice board for easy reference, in a manner that could be viewed by anyone who came into the office.
It hadn’t occurred to them that this wasn’t entirely the best thing to do. These are computer literate, committed and experienced human rights activists, who have no interest whatsoever in jeopardizing the information in the database and are acutely aware of the consequences of information in the database falling into the wrong hands. Yet, this sort of practice is common – in another Sri Lankan human rights advocacy organisation, users had actually posted up access details on Post-It notes that were stuck to the monitor!
InfoShare’s significant experience in the design and deployment of highly secure ICT solutions for peacebuilding / human rights protection suggests that network intrusions and data leaks are often the result of the monumental carelessness and oversight of end users rather than any sophisticating remote hacking by a third party. Sustained user education on security is vital and the design of information systems with multiple safeguards against this sort of bad practice.
As I told the colleague responsible for this particular oversight, good IT security hopes for commonsense but plans for the risk of disappointment.
Lesser folks and Buddhism according to Lankapuvath
March 8, 2008
Lankapuvath, Sri Lanka’s state owned news agency, launched a new website recently. Doesn’t look half-bad, though they don’t seem to have heard of RSS feeds.
Couple of gems inside the website. Lankapuvath describes itself thus:
Lankapuvath is the Sri Lanka’s National News Agency and only news agency in the country.
The only news agency in the country?!
But the real steal is the following excerpt from a grammatical and sociological tour de force titled Sri Lanka Culture and Heritage:
Ancient rulers of Sri Lanka built monuments established institutions to honor the philosophy of Buddhism. In turn this led to lesser folks following the principles advocated by Buddhism en masse.
Given that the whole post, ostensibly dealing with Sri Lanka’s culture and heritage, has no mention of any other identity aside from Sinhalese Buddhists, it’s not hard to guess who the lesser folks were.
And still are.
UPDATED: 5 March 2009
The Lankapuvath website has been updated and the link to the story above is no longer valid. Managed to pull a copy of the old page through Google Cache. It’s here online (though I don’t know how long Google Cache maintains archives) and here as a PDF.
Ushahidi – Testimonies of violence in Kenya on the web
January 16, 2008
“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something – any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”
Ory Okolloh, aka Kenyan Pundit, is who started it all.
Ushahidi is quite frankly an inspired and inspiring use of ICTs, including mobile phones, to bear witness to, record and facilitate action against the most dispiriting post-election violence in Kenya. It is one of the best mashups this author has seen dealing with the reporting and documenting of post-election violence and communal unrest, as well as a tool that facilitates international and local help to affected communities and victims.
I’ve passed this website around to a few people as the first meaningful application of an idea I first touted in 2006 talking about SMS, MMS and Google Maps mashups:
Rather than think of Citizen Media only as a text based initiative, mash-ups that match SMS location data with MMS / SMS messages onto a map, allowing users to browse through locations and messages related to that location, but also see an interactive timeline of the development of message clusters on a map, would have tremendous applications in mapping violence, confidence in peace, IDP movements and a whole raft of other issues.
At the beginning of a project like this the technology portion can seem to be the hardest to get off the ground. In the end, it’s just the tool, and the hard work will come from people in the field who are working with NGO’s to keep this information accurate and to chronicle as much of it as they can..
The tool allows for those on the ground to send in situation reports and alerts via the web and mobile phones. At the same time, the Kenyan government was warning mobile phone users of possible prosecution if they use SMS to cause public unrest, “The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.”
Others note the importance of going beyond technology to address the needs and concerns of those on the ground,
While blogging, emails, Twitter and the internet are doing a great deal of good getting the news out of what’s going on in Kenya to the rest of the world, I find myself troubled. You see, the communication that needs to be happening is at the grassroots level. Everyday Kenyans do not have access to any of these services. Let’s put our minds and capabilities towards solving real problems for people beyond the technologically elite.
While in principle agreeing that a technocratic approach to conflict resolution has its significant short-comings, I don’t agree with the sentiment above.
This suggests that the information presented on Ushahidi (Swahili for testimony) is somehow removed from the “real problems of real people”. As far as I can gather, Ushahidi is no work of fiction or a figment of the collective imagination of a few bloggers. By plotting violence, communal needs and actual incidents on a map, this becomes a vital record for the Kenyan State, NGOs and the international community including humanitarian agencies to know about and effectively plan for exigencies on the ground.
It is not just those who are connected (the “technologically (sic) elite”) who benefit, but all citizens, esp. those who don’t have access to technology. Those who choose to bear witness and report violence may be individuals empowered to do so using ICTs ranging from PCs to mobiles, but important to recognise is that they do so on behalf of others as well. Technology facilitates actions and responses for ALL victims of (post-election) violence, not just those who send in the reports and who have mobiles or PCs.
I had the rare opportunity to meet and talk with Ory Okolloh at the Global Knowledge Partnership in Malaysia late last year and wish her the best in this and all her ventures to bring about an end to violence in her country.
For another idea that could be helpful in Ory’s case, take a look at this. For a more detailed account of the evolution of Ushahidi, read Global Voices Online.
Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book (Edited by Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha with a Foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke) was published in December 2007. It is a multi-author book that discusses how information, education and communication can help create disaster resilient communities across the Asia Pacific region, home to half of humanity. It also takes a critical look at the communication lessons of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, and explores the role of good communications before, during and after disasters.
The book comprises 160 pages (17.3 cm x 24.4 cm) and contains 19 chapters authored by 21 contributors, plus 7 appendices. It is co-published by TVE Asia Pacific and UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok.
Download the entire book for free from here.
Also see:
ICT4Peace in 2007: Significant work, applied research and challenges
December 31, 2007
It’s been an bloody eventful year, literally and metaphorically.
Sri Lanka’s war escalated dramatically over the course of the year, with the LTTE suffering significantly at the hand of a Government hell-bent on its complete destruction. The timbre of democracy in Sri Lanka took many blows, not just through the erosion of human rights and the exacerbation of humanitarian crises in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka, but also through the continuing unconstitutional rule of the present regime. Demonstrating a racism and rabid intolerance mirroring that of the LTTE, the regime in the South displayed a totalitarian bent that in living memory was the worst it has been for democratic governance in Government controlled areas in Sri Lanka.
Work on ICT4Peace was placed against this sombre backdrop. Clearly, though we established significant markers in ICT4Peace writ large, the continuing violence, anxiety, insecurity and war means that there is very little to celebrate. I am convinced however, as never before, that ICTs can make an impact in a number of ways despite the rise of violence.
Human Rights Monitoring, Reporting and Advocacy
Key in this regard is a Human Rights Monitoring, Reporting and Advocacy platform for two leading human rights NGOs in Sri Lanka that InfoShare designed and developing using HURIDOCS. When I first met a representative of HURIDOCS in Geneva in 2007 and told him about the system, his first response was how we had managed to create a world-class system without even one single questions asked of them. Clearly, they were impressed.
Strategically, the system came at a useful time for the two organisations currently actively using it (in addition to other HR consortia interested in using it for their work in SL). The Sri Lankan government’s placement of extremely sharp and loquacious experts of spin and counter-propaganda to man its key High Commissions (Switzerland) and diplomatic fronts (SCOPP) posed a severe challenge to even leading HR advocacy groups in Sri Lanka. These organisations were good at international lobbying and HR advocacy, but unused to collecting, recording, storing and disseminating HR violation in a systematic manner, which meant that what they produced and released in the public domain was mercilessly decimated by the Government spin doctors as partial, inaccurate and untrue.
Moving away from the collection of records from, in some cases, Microsoft Word and Excel, into the highly structured and comprehensive HURIDOCS standard was more of a organisational challenge than technical, as is always the case with most ICTs introduced to the NGO sector to augment their work. Adequate training had to be given and human resources considerably strengthened in order to use the system, which over the coming years we hope will set a local and international standard for strong HR monitoring and advocacy.
Our human rights system features:
- Web based interface: The world’s first fully web based Human Rights monitoring and reporting system. The database will run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, ensuring the highest accessibility and a system highly resilient to changes and upgrades in operating systems.
- Admin interface: This consists of a full implementation of the internationally recognised HURIDOCS data gathering/interpretation system with a full-featured data management interface with which organisations can enter, edit and manage human rights information.
- Public advocacy website: This is equipped with charts, GIS maps and reports for data analysis as well as functionality to manage publications, articles and news related to human rights issues.
- Multiple user access levels that define whether a user can view public information, view confidential information, modify information or site settings. This enables organisations to give selective access to the data management interface to individuals and partners that they may wish to bring into future monitoring work. Further, this enables any partner anywhere in Sri Lanka or abroad enter data directly into the system that organisations can then verify and approve for publication.
- UNICODE standards based data entry: For person names and place names, the system includes extra fields to enter the same names in Sinhala and/or Tamil. Unicode text is used to make these fields searchable.
- Data export formats: currently exports to CSV, an industry cross-platform standard that enables users to view information on Excel or any other spreadsheet programme on any operating system
- RSS feeds of all new and updated content that enables critical updates of human rights to be accessed via email, SMS, mobile phone, PDA or newsreaders
- Automated periodic (day end/weekly/monthly) situation reports, available on the website as an archive and also available as an RSS feed.
- Database backup: the data on the server will be automatically backed up daily.
- Security: SSL will secure all data being transmitted between the user’s computer and the server.
- Browser compliance: all features are supported on Mozilla Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 2, and Internet Explorer 7.
- Over the wire and on-disk industry grade encryption and data security.
Fully complaint and backwards compatible with HURIDOC’s own (ageing) WinEvSys, our system is several generations ahead of it. We have planned an exciting range of features, from full mobile and PDA integration to advanced data visualisation including GIS that we will progressively build on to the system. I worked closely on the design and development of this system and am looking forward to its evolution.
Citizen journalism and New Media – Groundviews
Groundviews, launched in November 2006, came to be recognised over the course of 2007 as a site for original and path-breaking content on Sri Lanka. The site went on to win the first international award any civil society web based initiative / site has won in Sri Lanka - an award of excellence in new communications conferred by the Society for New Communications Research.
The content featured on the site over 2007 has responded to key events and processes in Sri Lanka with content that, on occasion, would not have been published in traditional media. Ground reports from the embattled North and East were useful foils to critically appreciate traditional media reports and propaganda on the war. Leading news and information websites such as TamilCanadian News, InfoLanka, Colombopage, Global Voices Online and numerous other blogs and websites, both local and international, now regularly link to the site.
Over the course of the year, Groundviews took on the malpractices of traditional media, web censorship, compelling perspectives of life in the midst of conflict, legal and political analyses, articles that critically analysed disaster response mechanisms and frameworks, issues such as the case of Rizana in Saudi Arabia that were largely ignored, at the time, in traditional media and on a number of occasions had to deal with the challenges posed by trolls and other miscreants.
In addition to this, Groundviews digitised and uploaded as well as archived and featured progressive videos on war and peace in Sri Lanka and fully incorporated Facebook into the website (to my knowledge, the first citizen journalism initaitive in the world to begin a Facebook Fan Page as an extension of the main site).
As of today, Groundviews on average gets around 20,000 pages views a month and around 700 page views a day (click here for more stats on the website and its readership).
Citizen journalism and New Media – Vikalpa, Vikalpa YouTube Channel and VOR Radio
Vikalpa was launched in 2007 to address the need for citizen journalism content in Sinhala and Tamil that critiqued the status quo. Even though Groundviews was and still is a place for tri-lingual content, much of the submissions came to me in English and I didn’t have the time to actively elicit and / or create content in the vernacular from the field.
With ICTA and UNESCO funding, Vikalpa started to generate content from the field on issues related to Groundviews but with an emphasis on the vernacular.
Vikalpa, which is run and edited by a team of two at CPA that I helped train in citizen journalism basics, has developed its own identity. Wholly based on UNICODE standards, that to date poses some problems with input of Sinhala to the site, Vikalpa nevertheless generates around 600 pageviews a day, which is incredible given what I thought (wrongly) would be the more limited audience of web users interested in alternative news and information in the vernacular (Sinhala / Tamil).
Vikalpa is the first and to date only CJ website in Sri Lanka that produces content in Sinhala and Tamil, including audio and video.
To this end, though not yet officially launched, the Vikalpa YouTube Channel was a pathbreaking exercise. Exclusively using the Nokia N93i (as an experiment to challenge ourselves to take mobile phone based news gathering to the limit) the channel was in the 3rd week of December ranked in the top 100 list of Directors on YouTube (ranked #82) for a video we uploaded that featured perspectives of the embattled city of Jaffna in Sinhala, that alone was viewed over 4,000 times. The channel itself has been viewed over 1,300 times since we created it, with many videos featured in it viewed hundreds of times.
Again, I was proved wrong on just how much of an audience there is for CJ content critically analysing war and peace in Sinhala and Tamil.
Voices of Reconciliation Radio (VOR Radio, Sri Lanka’s first and only civil society podcast website, was strengthened in 2007 over a hundred hours of programming, largely in Sinhala and Tamil, of content that explored social, political, economic, cultural and religious issues across all communities, ethnicities in Sri Lanka, including many voices and podcasts from communities in the East and North of Sri Lanka.
Notable in this regard was full selection of recordings from the first Women’s Tribunal in Sri Lanka on 25th November 2007, that includes deeply moving and compelling personal narratives of violence against women (click here and select November 2007 from the drop down list to get a list of all the podcasts).
Work with the ICT4Peace Foundation: ICT4Peace internationally
In my capacity as Special Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland, I was part of several interesting meetings over the course of the year culminating in the launch of the ICT4Peace: An International Process for Conflict Management at the United Nations in New York on 15th November 2007.
I penned a brief write-up of this event for the PeaceIT! magazine put out by the Crisis Management Initiative. A full list of documents on this process, including the report of the event, can be found on the ICT4Peace Foundation’s website here.
In addition to this, I also made a submission on behalf of the Foundation at the United Nations OCHA +5 Symposium held in Geneva in October 2007.
The Foundation also launched in 2007 the web’s first wiki that catalogues real world examples and applied research of ICT4Peace.
Publications and writing on ICT4Peace, New Media and Citizen Journalism
I wrote far more in 2007 to web and traditional media, as well as chapters to books, than I did in 2006. Most of my writing, that can be found on this blog, Groundviews as well as on my personal blog, were written as personal responses to and critiques on the situation in Sri Lanka.
Of my writing on ICT4Peace per se, the most notable submissions were:
- Who’s afraid of citizen journalists? - Chapter from “Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book”
- Television for peacebuilding: An impossible dream? – Chapter from Media & Peace in South Asia, published by South Asian Policy Analysts Network and edited by Imtiaz Alam, South Asian Studies, Volume XII
- Citizen Journalism and humanitarian aid: Bane or boon? (unpublished book chapter)
- Citizens + Media: Amplifying voices for peace through citizen journalism (speech for grassroots civil society activists in Sri Lanka on the potential of new media, CJ and ICTs in general to strengthen their work)
- Citizen Journalism and Peacebuilding: Is there a connection? (published on Madrid11’s website)
- Input into ICT for Disaster Management e-primer, authored by Chanuka Wattegama and published by APDIP
- SMS alerts during emergencies – Lessons from Sri Lanka’s tsuanmi alert on 13 September 2007
- Critique of Guidelines for Relations between US Armed Forces and Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organisations in Hostile or Potentially Hostile Environments published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).
Other significant developments and writing related to ICT4Peace, New Media and Citizen Journalism
- For the first time, leading traditional / mainstream media organsiations in Sri Lanka recognised blogs and bloggers as journalists, who were to be afforded the same status and protection of other print and electronic journalists.
- Dialog Telekom, a leading ISP and mobile telecommunications provider in Sri Lanka, based in part of my critique of their marketing, were forced to change their spiel with regards to the availability of WiMax based broadband in areas they has ostensibly “covered”.
- One of my most read posts this year was one in which, using the experience of a bomb that killed 30 that went off close to my residence, I pointed out the trappings of using SMSs to communicate in emergencies.
- Key strategic input into a range of initiatives to strengthen civil society advocacy, collaboration and interoperability through InfoShare, more details of which are available here. This included editing media training manuals under Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Programme for augmenting the IT capacity of journalists in Sri Lanka.
- The first and only monitoring exercise of the timeliness and accuracy of SMS news alerts in Sri Lanka.
- Participation in and critical thoughts on the Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) Forum held in Liverpool, England in April 2007. This included two presentations on Online Dispute Resolution and Second Life and Online Dispute Resolution: Where to now?
So what?
I’m often asked what all this means. My response is simple. As noted at the beginning of the post, despite the increase in violence domestically, Groundviews, Vikalpa and VOR Radio in particular, but also the burgeoning Sri Lankan blogosphere in general offer a range of rich and varied perspectives on democracy, peace and war in Sri Lanka.
Some of the voices for example featured on VOR Radio are now no longer with us. The perspectives on Groundviews have engendered discussions and greater awareness on issues that traditional media has only managed to cover through stereotypes. Vikalpa has exposed little known facts of life even in Colombo, such as the existence of high security zones within the University of Colombo.
As I note in my article on citizens journalism on Madrid11:
There is no guarantee that Groundviews will foster a new social movement in support of peace. There is no guarantee it will secure peace, in any greater degree, on the ground and in the north and east of Sri Lanka, where it is needed most. There is no guarantee that hate speech will not take over the timbre of online debate. The more Groundviews is successful in fostering new voices in support of peace, the more it will become a target of concerted attacks to prevent its growth.
And it is here that our greatest challenge lies. Not in the technology itself, but in the creation of a social and political movement – one fostered by citizen journalism mediated through new media and new technology – that is able to maintain, in some small way, the hope of a just and lasting peace in Sri Lanka.
This hope fuels Groundviews, not as a simplistic magic bullet against terrorism, but as an increasingly important vehicle for ordinary citizens to record their views in support of democracy as the only way through which terrorism can be effectively combated.
Challenges
One of the greatest challenges I’ve had to deal with this year has been in responding to the significant challenge of trolls and hate speech online. Two spikes of hate speech and trolling on Groundviews – one for around 2 to 3 months in early 2007 and the other, ongoing at the time I write this and after our award, suggest that with every expansion of the sites to new audiences brings with it a share of new trolls and anonymous commentators who seek to use the fora to promote their own blinkered viewpoints that they parade as patriotic. This despite clearly stated guidelines for submissions and the tone of manner of discussion.
Editing and deleting these comments invariably brings the argument by those who have little tolerance for its otherwise (see comments in response to this post), that the sites flagrantly violate the freedom of expression.
Some of the trolls started their own blog posts to name and shame the sites and one other, most recently (and hilariously, I think) started his own blog for posts and comments rejected from Groundviews.
On the one hand, this demonstrates the high visibility and veracity our citizen journalism sites command locally and internationally, in English as well as in the vernacular. A comment or post on any of the CJ sites we’ve created is guaranteed more visibility than a personal blog. This is its own attraction for those trolls.
On the other, I’ve often had to make judgement calls, based on the guidelines and also on what I feel a particular post or comment may engender in subsequent comments and submissions. All of the posts on Groundviews deal with highly emotive and divisive issues, more so in light of the widening, violent disconnect between pro-democracy NGOs (and the public writings of those working in or associated with them) and the larger polity and society in the Sinhala South (and their counterparts amongst the diaspora, who often tend to be more rabid, intolerant and insufferable).
It’s been tremendously challenging to edit Groundviews in particular (and the other sites less frequently) because I’ve had to continuously weigh personal threats to self and family that come in the form of comments and emails against the need to keep the forums as open as possible to content that may rile the pseudo-nationalists and patriots, but are viewpoints that need to be features precisely because they are being erased apace in traditional and other media in Sri Lanka.
The most challenging comments however are those that may be overwhelmingly spiteful, but carry an essence of truth in them that if only the person could articulate sans the viciousness, would be genuinely useful to further debate. Interestingly, efforts to communicate with those who communicate in such a manner have on occasion proved fruitful. One case is with someone called Justmal, who made some rabid comments earlier in the year against me personally and others published on Groundviews, but over time, has demonstrated a marked ability to engage intelligently with the content therein.
On balance, I think that moderated fora work better than unmoderated discussion spaces. The lessons from Moju were well learnt in this regard, even though the challenge of moderating is quite honestly extremely draining with little that comes in the way of thanks save for the content I’ve engendered that serves as a vital record and archive of discussions for posterity.
Final thoughts
ICT4Peace, a field that since 2003 I’ve worked hard to define through applied research and practice, came of age in 2007. Through the work of the ICT4Peace Foundation at the international policy level and my own, more humble efforts in Sri Lanka within violent conflict, I think the acronym and what is means and stands for is now part and parcel of the debates on conflict resolution, Online Dispute Resolution, SSTR, civilian-military relations, crisis management and humanitarian aid.
I’m looking forward to 2008 to consolidate this appreciation of ICT4Peace.
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