Blocking social networks after terrorist attacks can do more harm than good, especially in places like Sri Lanka where official sources are often unreliable
We should be suspicious when governments crack down on speech in the name of safety — Imagine for a moment that you run …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time in just over a year that Sri Lanka has cut off its citizens from the same platforms: after mob violence in March 2018, the government ordered ISPs to block Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Viber for amplifying hate speech, and now it has repeated the move following the deadly explosions, per this week's nationwide block of WhatsApp and Facebook.
The argument lands differently because of what came in between: government and civil society groups had already documented that Facebook failed for years to remove accounts inciting ethnic violence in Sri Lanka. So the state is responding to a real platform failure — but with a tool that also severs the channels citizens use to verify information when official sources are themselves often unreliable.
First-order effects
- Sri Lankan citizens immediately lose WhatsApp and Facebook during an active emergency — precisely the channels used to check rumors against family networks and on-the-ground reports while official statements lag or mislead.
Second-order effects
- Each block hands Facebook a sharper dilemma: its documented failure to moderate Sinhala- and Tamil-language incitement gives governments a ready-made justification for access restrictions, shifting the cost of weak moderation onto users' connectivity.
Third-order effects
- If blocking becomes the default crisis response, states learn that platform governance failures can be leveraged into broader speech controls — normalizing temporary shutdowns as standing emergency powers rather than last resorts.
The trend: Governments are increasingly treating platform-access control as a crisis-management tool, turning social networks' moderation failures into pretexts for state-controlled information environments.