Banning Sri Lankan porn online: A couple of months after…

ICT for Peacebuilding 1 Minute

Responding to an ill-advised and misguided petition filed by the IGP (yes, the same one who said mobile phones can be used by rape victims as evidence), the courts ordered the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC) to ban twelve sex sites in July 2009.

At the time, pro-government Sinhala media incredibly suggested that these sites were evidence of “an international conspiracy to tarnish the image of the country”, in addition to of course the hundreds of other conspiracies floating around.

Fast forward a couple of months, and it appears that the blocking of these sites is as haphazard as the blocking of news sites during Sri Lanka’s presidential elections. On both counts, the government of Sri Lanka demonstrates a monumental ignorance of progressive telecoms policy, confusing hypocritical morality with individual liberty and good parenting. The table below also suggests that there is really no coordinated approach to the implementation of these bans imposed by even by court order.

Dialog today remains the most open ISP, allowing four of the twelve banned sites on its network (though 3 of them are expired, and another just redirects to a different sex site). But even with SLT, the banning of sites is bizarre. http://www.tamilcanadian.com, and the popular news.tamilcanadian.com news aggregation portal is inaccessible on SLT ADSL, but freely accessibly via Mobitel HSPA and of course, Dialog. Why this is the case is anyone’s guess, but it points to a filtering regime that is still largely uncoordinated.

This may however all change with the Chinese expertise the Sri Lankan government is getting to help track down inconvenient information online.

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