In the aftermath of attacks on Easter Sunday that left almost 300 dead in Sri Lanka, the government temporarily blocked social media, fearing that violence fueled by misinformation would spread. That decision has again prompted debates on social media regulation and the role of tech companies to deal with content on their platforms.
In Sri Lanka, fears about social media spreading violence were not unwarranted. In 2018, rumors shared online that Muslim shopkeepers were putting sterilization pills in food served to Buddhists, for example, spiraled into real life violence. This time, real attacks and real deaths buoyed by religiously charged misinformation threatened to do even worse.
Underpinning those concerns, of course, is the country’s recent history. A bloody civil war between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil Muslim minority only ended in 2009. Although the Tamil combatants were suppressed and there has been relative stability since, there are clearly lingering tensions.
And if there was any doubt about the potential for online content to do real damage, in Myanmar it already has. As described in a report from the United Nations, social media became a tool to propagate hate with posts and rumors contributing to ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslim minority. False online rumors, calculated to play on existing social divisions, quickly translated into deadly, real-life attacks.
A similar logic underpinned efforts after the deadly attack on New Zealand mosques to scrub the shooter’s video and manifesto from social media as well as other attempts to bar content that was explicitly created to fuel social division.
In all of these instances, however, Facebook, WhatsApp, and other forms of social media were clearly not the source of the violence. Instead, the platforms served as a means to spread hate and stir up existing fears and tensions that already existed in society.
That means that banning Facebook or WhatsApp, while potentially effective in stemming misinformation in a crisis, will only ever be a temporary solution to the underlying issue that, like everything else, found its way online. The violence didn’t start with social media, and it won’t end with it either.
