{"id":47715,"date":"2019-04-29T14:07:41","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=47715"},"modified":"2019-04-29T14:07:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:07:41","slug":"shutting-down-social-media-does-not-reduce-violence-but-rather-fuels-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/shutting-down-social-media-does-not-reduce-violence-but-rather-fuels-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Shutting down social media does not reduce violence, but rather fuels it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIn the wake of a\u00a0series of coordinated attacks<\/a>\u00a0that claimed more than 250 lives on April 21, the government of Sri Lanka shut off its residents\u2019 access to\u00a0social media and online messaging systems<\/a>, including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat and Viber. The official government concern was that \u201cfalse news reports were spreading through social media<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some commentators\u00a0applauded the move<\/a>, suggesting the dangers of disinformation on social media\u00a0justified shutting down communication networks<\/a>\u00a0in times of crisis.\u00a0Five years of research<\/a>\u00a0on the impact of shutdowns and other information controls on societies worldwide have led me to the exact opposite conclusion.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0diverse community<\/a>\u00a0of academics, businesses and civil society groups shares my view. The blackouts deprived Sri Lankans of impartial news reports and\u00a0disconnected families from each other<\/a>\u00a0as they sought to find out who had survived and who was among the dead and injured. Most strikingly, recent research suggests that the blackouts might have increased the potential for protest and violence in the wake of the attack.<\/p>\n

A constellation of control<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sri Lanka\u2019s latest social media shutdown was not an isolated incident. The first time Sri Lanka took a\u00a0similar action<\/a>\u00a0was amid\u00a0violent unrest in 2018<\/a>. It was one of\u00a0188 network shutdowns<\/a>\u00a0or large-scale disruptions to digital communication that year all around the world, according to digital rights advocacy organization Access Now.<\/p>\n

Overall, since the Arab Spring began in 2010, governments have carried out at least\u00a0400 shutdowns<\/a>\u00a0across more than\u00a040 countries<\/a>. Those include hundreds of ephemeral shutdowns in India, where they\u00a0first emerged<\/a>\u00a0as a localized response to unrest in the northern region of Kashmir and\u00a0subsequently spread<\/a>\u00a0to most other states.<\/p>\n

The number also includes so-called \u201cdigital sieges<\/a>,\u201d which last for weeks or months at a time. For example, long-lasting, government-imposed blackouts\u00a0have ravaged burgeoning digital economies<\/a>\u00a0such as that of Anglophone Cameroon and have\u00a0disconnected businesses, relatives and communities<\/a>\u00a0in Chad for more than a year.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0after\u00a0study<\/a>, civil society organizations have documented the\u00a0human rights problems<\/a>\u00a0caused by internet shutdowns and the\u00a0economic damage<\/a>\u00a0they produce.<\/p>\n

Only recently have researchers begun to ask a more fundamental question: Do massive disruptions to digital communication achieve their intended purposes? Sri Lanka\u2019s government is one of many to publicly claim that their goal in severing communication links is to prevent the spread of disinformation and decrease violence based on those falsehoods \u2013 but not a single one has followed a shutdown with any sort of evidence that it worked to protect public safety.<\/p>\n

Exploring the (dis)connection<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Of course, the coexistence of social media and social turbulence does not necessarily imply that one causes the other.\u00a0Many<\/a>\u00a0scholars<\/a>\u00a0have\u00a0tried<\/a>\u00a0to figure out if there is a link between access to social media and violence, but it\u2019s an extremely difficult task.<\/p>\n

For one thing, social media websites and services are\u00a0always changing<\/a>\u00a0how their systems work<\/a>, making them hard to study over time. Connectivity also advances at a lightning-fast pace: In 2018, for instance,\u00a0internet penetration in rural India<\/a>\u00a0increased at an annual rate of 30%, connecting hundreds of millions of people for the first time. Today,\u00a0roughly three Indian citizens<\/a>\u00a0are introduced to the internet every second.<\/p>\n

Shutdowns, however, are fixed in time and space, and their effects blanket large swathes of an area\u2019s population. This lets scholars study their effects with more confidence. Paradoxically, then, one of the best methods of evaluating technology\u2019s effects on society may be to examine what happens when communications are suddenly cut off.<\/p>\n