Election misinformation poses a credible threat to Sri Lanka’s democracy. While it is expected that any electorate hardly operates with perfect information, our research finds that the presence of an election misinformation industry in Sri Lanka producing and disseminating viral false assertions has the potential to distort constituents’ information diets and sway their electoral choices. That many citizens are ill-equipped to manage the oftentimes cognitively burdensome task of determining the veracity of political information in an information-heavy environment exacerbates this issue. This, in turn, may jeopardize social cohesion and undermine what is otherwise, generally, a robust electoral process.

In 2023, LIRNEasia led an IDRC-funded project to 1) understand election influence operations and measures to counter disinformation globally, especially pertaining to Asia; 2) map actors who are involved in election related counter-disinformation actions in five countries in South and Southeast Asia, and 3) document their past and upcoming activities related to countering disinformation around elections. The final project report can be found here: https://lirneasia.net/2024/09/election-misinformation-in-south-and-south-east-asia-the-phenomenon-and-measures-to-counter-it-report-draft/. This post presents a brief summary of the Sri Lanka country research report. The country report sought to expand on the limited discourse on this phenomenon ahead of the 2024 Presidential Elections by providing the following: an overview of Sri Lanka’s socioeconomic and political landscape and electoral system, a discussion of the characteristics of Sri Lankan election misinformation and safeguards against misinformation in the country, and a case study of Hashtag Generation, a non-profit civil society organisation that conducted counter-misinformation operations during the 2019 presidential and 2020 parliamentary elections.

The report found the following:

• Election misinformation is spread through targeted, at times well-funded operations involving political parties/candidates, the mainstream media, and bad faith ‘gun for hire’ actors. Social media – free of the operational constraints of traditional news media on account of the anonymity and wide content viewership it affords creators – is a hotbed for election misinformation production and dissemination.
• Election misinformation can take five forms: election misinformation aimed at harming a political party, a candidate, or an individual or group affiliated with a party or candidate; misinformation that bolsters the image of a candidate or party; false assertions levelled against government institutions; misinformation concerning an entity unaffiliated with a party, candidate, government institution; and misinformation about a particular event or phenomenon. Substance-wise, election misinformation covers a range of topics, typically leveraging existing social cleavages and woes of citizens.
• Existing legal and institutional safeguards are inadequate to counter election misinformation and its impacts.
• Actors like Hashtag Generation who engage in initiatives like fact-checking serve as limited bulwarks against election misinformation, and are alone insufficient to tackle a problem that requires a more coordinated effort among the stakeholders best equipped to tackle this phenomenon: platforms, news media organizations, government, and other civil society organisations. Efforts to improve media literacy and critical thinking skills among voters to reduce their susceptibility to election misinformation-induced attitudinal and/or belief shifts might serve as more sustainable, less draconian, democratically compatible means to address the issue.