«From the burning of the Notre Dame in Paris to heinous terrorism in Sri Lanka and Christchurch, social media inextricably is entwined with how billions see or engage with the world.» More details at https://ict4peace.org/activities/full-video-slidedeck-of-lecture-from-christchurch-to-sri-lanka-the-curious-case-of-social-media/

1. from christchurch
to sri lanka
the curious
case of social
media
sanjana hattotuwa
ict4peace foundation

2. facebook
1,117
accounts
across 25
clusters

3. twitter
962 accounts
across 25
clusters

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

5. christchurch
march 2019
• 51 dead, including children
• 50 injured

6. easter sunday
april 2019
• around 260 dead including
• 45 children
• around 500 injured, some for life

7. public pulse over social
media
signatures, signals and
signs

8. a divided country
a decade after end of
war

9. #victorydaysl
13-18 may

11. #mullivaikkal
13-18 may

13. weaponising
affordances
democratic or
damoclean

14. volume, vector, velocity
scale, scope and speed

17. one video every second
uploaded to youtube

18. unprecedented
measures
• stopped search for recent uploads
• stopped human reviews (allowing false positives
through)

20. interplay with
communal violence
accelerants for infamy

21. swarms (or mobs)
fluid dynamics

23. collective intelligence
natural & neural to
social & political

25. adhesion
cohesion
repulsion

28. context
country
community

30. mob mentality &
violence
irreducible to single or
simple drivers

31. ai as accelerant

34. ai limitations
interpretation, context,
hashing

38. ml and nlp limitations

41. context conflation

43. the flip side
unseen & under-
appreciated by West

44. christchurch attack
hashtag co-occurrence

46. christchurch attack
wordclouds

47. #49lives #theyareus

49. social media during
constitutional chaos
democratic pushback

52. twitter in 2018
#lka & #srilanka, 470k

54. interactions
on facebook

55. twitter, photos &
collages
activism & art

58. memes & cartoons
pushback &
normalisation

60. easter sunday
immediate responses

65. memes
against violence

67. inflection points
course correction or
cementing chaos

68. #deletefacebook
why it will never
take root outside
the west

69. regulation from westis not always for
the best

70. a business model gone
awry
from quantity to
quality, profits
anchored to
timbre & tenor

71. pivot to privacy
counter-
intuitively may
help drivers of
violence, thwart
academic study

72. dna of politics
reflects and
refracts
dynamics, from
democracy to
populism

73. algorithmic oversightbeyond human
scale

74. complex media
ecologies
divisions between
mainstream,
traditional and social
media lost

75. networked gatekeeping
social media
companies as gate-
keepers as well as
democratisation of
gate-keeping

76. what’s past is prologue
shakespeare

77. thank you
ict4peace.org