High social media crimes due to no regulation
The lack of social media regulation in the country has seen complaints on meta platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram along with other such platforms increasing over the past few years, officials say.
More than 70 per cent of complaints to the Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team (SLCERT) are incidents related to Facebook, data shows.
Last year, complaints related to social media incidents amounted to 15,509, as opposed to the year before when it was 16,975. The number has reduced by nearly 1500 because complaints were directed to the separate section in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) where they deal with computer crimes, officials told The Business Times on Wednesday. These social media incidents contain Instagram, WhatsApp, and other platforms apart from Facebook, they added.
SLCERT gives technical support in terms of such incidents to authorities.
Data also showed that last year there were 182 complaints of abuse, hate and, privacy violations to SLCERT while the previous year it was 181. The lack of policy for social media has been a stimulation for the rising abusers, officials said, noting that the best hope for Sri Lanka is to enact the Data Protection Act as fast as possible to combat these crimes.
They said that service providers help or rarely assist in incidents of fake accounts. For example, Facebook has a list of priority cases such as incidents threatening national security, incidents related to minors, drugs etc where they help local authorities and exchange data.
There is a longer route to bring them to justice by making a police complaint and getting a court order for Facebook to release the information. However, officials said that with the new Act, the service providers need to comply with the local laws.
Meta Spokesperson, Priyanka Bhalla, Safety Policy Manager for South Asia 2018 said they have heavily invested in building digital awareness to support the people of Sri Lanka, including its young population. “In 2020, we launched our flagship We Think Digital programme in Sri Lanka in partnership with Sarvodaya-Fusion and supported by the Ministry of Education, Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) and other partners.”
Under this programme, over 200,000 students, teachers, teacher trainers, vocational trainers, persons with disabilities, and young women were reached, via training and campaigns on the safe use of social media.
“We hope to continue supporting Sri Lankans by sharing resources to develop skills that enable them to create a positive and safe culture online,” she added.
A three-pronged, industry-leading approach to protecting young people online by the meta team involves focusing on preventing harm from happening in the first place by enforcing zero-tolerance policies and developing cutting-edge, preventative tools, deploy sophisticated technology to proactively find and remove more than 99 per cent of this content – often at the point of upload and before anyone sees it and to make it easy to report potential harms.
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