The report “Social Media Regulation and the Rule of Law: Key Trends in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh”, which was launched recently in Colombo, examines the balance between state security, human rights, and the role of social media across these South Asian nations. This collaborative effort involves Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme Asia, LIRNEasia Sri Lanka, the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) at the National Law University Delhi (NLUD) India, and the School of Law at BRAC University Bangladesh. The report provides several crucial observations and recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders alike: Key observations from the report: Bangladesh and India provide conditional liability exemptions for third-party content hosted by intermediaries, but recent legislative trends suggest a weakening of safe harbour protection. Across all three countries, centralisation of power with the executive is evident, resulting in regulatory frameworks lacking effective judicial and parliamentary oversight over blocking orders, internet suspensions, and user data requests. The centralisation of power with the executive has also fostered a lack of transparency and accountability in government actions, often justified by state security interests. 
The report “Social Media Regulation and the Rule of Law: Key Trends in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh”, which was launched recently in Colombo, examines the balance between state security, human rights, and the role of social media across these South Asian nations. This collaborative effort involves Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme Asia, LIRNEasia Sri Lanka, the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) at the National Law University Delhi (NLUD) India, and the School of Law at BRAC University Bangladesh. The report provides several crucial observations and recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders alike: Key observations from the report: Bangladesh and India provide conditional liability exemptions for third-party content hosted by intermediaries, but recent legislative trends suggest a weakening of safe harbour protection. Across all three countries, centralisation of power with the executive is evident, resulting in regulatory frameworks lacking effective judicial and parliamentary oversight over blocking orders, internet suspensions, and user data requests. The centralisation of power with the executive has also fostered a lack of transparency and accountability in government actions, often justified by state security interests. 
In response to the alarming surge of information disorder affecting online platforms, LIRNEasia is exploring to provide evidence-based recommendations to policymakers on how best to equip Sri Lankan early adolescence with skills to navigate the digital world safely and responsibly. This is through a two-year research project on digital literacy among Sri Lankan adolescents aged 11 to 18. In partnership with Sarvodaya Fusion, LIRNEasia is taking an experimental approach, using qualitative methods. This initiative involves the comparison of two cohorts of early adolescents with varied demographics, including language and sectors like urban, rural, and estate. While one group undergoes intensive digital literacy training, the other serves as a control group without such training. 
In a recent interview with Face the Nation on Sirasa TV, LIRNEasia Chair Prof. Rohan Samarajiva raised his concerns regarding the Online Safety Bill which is currently under debate in the Sri Lankan Parliament. Prof. Samarajiva explained why he believes the Bill, instead of addressing the issues related to harmful online content in Sri Lanka, is fixated on punishment rather than prevention and deterrence. “I believe there are problems with online content in Sri Lanka, but this Bill does not address those problems,” said Prof. 
In November last year, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court determined that the Online Safety Bill is not inconsistent with the Constitution and can be passed in parliament by a simple majority– subject to amendments made to 31 of its provisions. The second reading debate for the Bill is scheduled to take place in Parliament on January 23 and 24. In a recent interview on the Sirasa Pathikada programme, Chair of LIRNEasia, Professor Rohan Samarajiva elaborated on the key recommendations put forth by the Supreme Court concerning several sections of the bill that require modification. He also spoke about the flaws of the Bill and reiterated that the Bill is riddled with potential for abuse. Watch the full interview here. 
"Safeguarding freedom of speech and expression is so important that it is constitutionally protected in most civilised countries, as it is in Sri Lanka. Legislators seeking to address the new problems posed by rapid and articulated dissemination of user generated content must first decide what the priority is. If it is rapid takedown (to avoid situations such as the live-streaming of the Christchurch massacre), the solution is not what is proposed in this bill. By the time the “Online Truth Commission,” likely to be ill-resourced like most regulatory bodies, issues its orders the damage will be done."
Wijeratne, Y., de Silva, N. (2020). Sinhala Language Corpora and Stopwords from a Decade of Sri Lankan Facebook. LIRNEasia.
Presented by Helani Galpaya, Ayesha Zainudeen and Tharaka Amarasinghe on 22 May 2019 in Colombo, Sri Lanka
The biggest barrier to policing social media is language. Based on a draft LIRNEasia white paper on neural language processing. Published in Foreign Policy.
A whitepaper distilling LIRNEasia's current thoughts on the possibilities and issues with the computation extraction of syntactic and semantic language from digital text.
Nepal performs better on Internet connectivity and mobile phone use than its wealthier neighbors in Asia, our AfterAccess surveys showed.
Seventy-two percent of the Nepali population aged 15-65 owned a mobile phone, and 60% of these were Internet-enabled (feature or smartphone). In addition, 46% of Nepali’s are aware of the Internet – the highest reported number out of the Asian countries included in the report: India, Pakistan, Myanmar Bangladesh and Cambodia.
Presented by Helani Galpaya (@helanigalpaya), CEO, LIRNEasia and Tharaka Amarasinghe (@tharaka89), Research Manager, LIRNEasia on 4 October 2018 in Kathmandu, Nepal
LIRNEasia. (2018). AfterAccess: ICT access and use in Asia and the Global South (Version 1). Colombo: LIRNEasia 
The AfterAccess surveys have revealed that by late 2017 only 13% of Bangladeshis aged 15-65 had EVER used the Internet and social media. This is despite 45% of the same age group owning an Internet-friendly device.
Is this a sign that Facebook is moving into transactions and payments in an even bigger way? Under Facebook’s new emerging technologies group, Mr. Zuckerberg has also created a new team focused on blockchain, a digital ledger that underpins virtual currencies like Bitcoin. The group will be led by David Marcus, who had been overseeing Facebook Messenger, with the mandate of examining how Facebook can incorporate blockchain. Over the last six months, three people who have had conversations with Mr.
In early April, the Indonesian government considered banning Facebook amid concerns of privacy breaches and potential abuse of the platform to influence the upcoming presidential elections through fake news and hate speech. Ibrahim Kholilul Rohman and Ayesha Zainudeen used indicative survey data on the use of social media and other online services by 1,200 Indonesian citizens collected by LIRNEasia in 2017 in this article (Bahasa-Kontan.co.id., English – The Jakarta Post) first published on Tuesday, 24 April 2018.
Here is what Mark Zuckerberg said in his testimony before a Senate Committee: He also said that while Facebook is beefing up its use of AI to spot and remove offensive content, it will be five to 10 years before the company will have tools to do this automatically. So I was correct in my phrasing in the New York Times op ed: Media companies of all kinds must accept responsibility and deploy artificial intelligence and plain old elbow grease to the task. And people of good will must play their part by calling out falsehoods and reporting those responsible. So let’s apply the elbow grease while working on the AI.