The Town They Told to Belong to One Faith
In early 2018 a video urging Sinhalese to converge on the Sri Lankan town of Digana circulated online before anti-Muslim riots burned homes and killed at least three people. Facebook later apologised for its role, and the government had already blocked the platform during the unrest.
The violence in central Sri Lanka in early 2018 followed a now-familiar sequence: a message spread online, a crowd gathered, and property and lives were lost before the platform carrying the message went dark by government order.
A video, then a mob
Unrest against Muslims began in the eastern town of Ampara in late February 2018 and spread into the Kandy district, including the town of Digana, in early March, according to Al Jazeera. At least three people were killed and 20 injured, and mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were burned, mainly in the Sinhalese Buddhist-majority centre of the country.
Shortly before the riots, a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist named Amith Weerasinghe posted a video to Facebook and YouTube urging his followers to converge on Digana, Al Jazeera reported. “This town has come to belong only to the Muslims,” he said in the video, which gained more than 50,000 views on YouTube in a week. Weerasinghe, who was later arrested over the violence, had more than 150,000 followers on Facebook, BuzzFeed News reported.
The government pulled the plug
As the violence spread, Sri Lanka's government declared a state of emergency and blocked Facebook, along with Instagram and WhatsApp. The country's telecommunications minister at the time, Harin Fernando, told BuzzFeed News that officials had lost patience with the company's response times. “Facebook would go three or four months before making a response. We were upset,” he said. “In this incident, we had no alternative — we had to stop Facebook.” The government lifted the restrictions in mid-March after Facebook representatives visited the country, the outlet reported.
An apology, two years later
In May 2020, Facebook apologised for its role after commissioning an investigation by Article One, a human-rights consultancy. The consultants found that hate speech and rumours on the platform “may have led to ‘offline’ violence,” and that the company's failure to remove such content had allowed it to remain and spread, according to Al Jazeera. “We deplore the misuse of our platform,” Facebook said in a statement. “We recognise, and apologise for, the very real human rights impacts that resulted.”
The investigation also highlighted the thinness of the company's moderation in the region. Officials had said in 2018 that Facebook had “only two resource persons” to review content in Sinhala, the language of the majority whose members carried out the violence, Al Jazeera reported. One civil-society organisation had tried to raise concerns with the company about misuse of the platform as far back as 2009.