Presentation delivered at Search for Common Ground (SFCG) workshop on 30 January 2020 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

1. Social media &
elections
Dark designs for
democracy in Sri
Lanka

2. New fears: Franchise &
Facebook

3. FTVs & young voters since 2010
~700,000 1st time voters in
January 2010 Presidential
election out of 14 million total.
Jan. 2010
955,990 1st time voters in
January 2015 Presidential
election out of 15 million total.
Jan. 2015
~700,000 1st time at local
government elections in
February 2018, out of 15.7
million total.
Feb. 2018
18-34 demographic are 15.1% of
total electorate in 2018.
2018
Out of 15,992,096 eligible &
registered voters, 30.8% are
youth voters & 1.55% are first
time voters.
2019

4. 30.1%

5. Source: Nuwan Senaratna

7. FacebookTwitterShort-termLong-term
Entrenchment /
Normalisation
Justification /
Dominance /
Contestation
Harbinger /
Feeder / Outward
looking
Intention /
Substantive debate
/ Manipulation /
Engagement
SeaSandSoil Shore

8. Social media ecologies
on Facebook (2019)

9. Who shapes public
imagination?

10. Who defines political
communications?

11. Gossip, Memes, English
& Sinhala media pages

12. VideosNumber of posts Interactions

13. Page growth

14. Gossip & SFCG pages

15. Posts & video engagement

16. Post production (SFCG vs. Gossip)

17. Memes (November
2019)

19. Memes (December
2019)

21. Memes (January 2019)

23. Role, reach & relevance of civil
society vs. TV channel content

24. 1 Aug to 29 January (6 months)

25. Number of posts Video engagement Interactions

26. Dark economies during
campaigns

32. Overt strategies
• Partisan private TV broadcast content floods Facebook
(time-shifted, edited clips)
• Increasing spending on Facebook, Instagram, Google
Ad Words
• Apps pegged to party or politician
• Instant messaging as a vector for campaign propaganda

33. Overt strategies
• Social media propaganda continues unabated during
cooling period, outside of official party and politician
pages.
• Increase in scale, scope and speed of propaganda’s
production & promotion on social media

34. Covert strategies
• Buy out to black out (opponents)
• Distract through entertainment
• Decry through coordination
• Hidden collaboration between disparate pages
• Manufactured authenticity through sponsored content
• Leveraging influencer networks for propaganda seed &
spread

35. 6 axes of
social media
manipulation
Fear (!ය/
ස්වයංවාරන)
Friction
(ඝෂ,ණය)
Flooding
(./ම)
Volume
(ප2මාව /
කෑගහ7න)
Velocity
(8ෙ:ගය)
Vector
(ෙ:;කාව)

36. 6 threats
from social
media
Echo chambers,
polarisation and hyper-
partisanship
Spread of false or
misleading information
Conflation of popularity
with legitimacy
Political manipulation Micro-targeting and
behaviour change
Intolerance, exclusion &
hate speech

37. Thank you
sanjanah@gmail.com