ICC Note: Civil society groups in Sri Lanka are pushing for the social media gaint Facebook to do more to prevent religious hate speech. The government had temporarily blocked the use of Facebook and WhatsApp during anti-Muslim riots last month, and have been urged by civil society groups to make hate speech illegal. On top of all of this, the government in Sri Lanka is considering making religious classes on Sundays mandatory for children between 6 and 19 years of age.

04/20/2018 Sri Lanka (World Watch Monitor) -Civil society groups in Sri Lanka have asked Facebook to do more to prevent hate speech, including comments that discriminate on religious lines, following recent anti-Muslim riots.

“There was a post in the Sinhala [Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic group] language on Facebook for six days, which mentioned ‘killing all Muslims, without sparing even a child, because they are dogs’,” Raisa Wickrematunga from the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives told Catholic news agency UCAN.

In an open letter last week, the Centre for Policy Alternatives joined 11 other civil society groups in asking Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, “to ensure Facebook’s Community Standards are implemented in local languages and contexts”.

They said this was “particularly important in countries and contexts scarred by violence or war and [featuring] underlying communal, religious, ethnic, political and gender disparities”.

During anti-Muslim riots last month, the government temporarily blocked use of social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.

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