Get The Trolls Out! Monitoring and Combating Online Hate Speech and Disinformation Campaigns in Sri Lanka (GTTOSL) was a 3 year project which aimed to foster social cohesion in Sri Lanka by developing critical thinking skills among online audiences and building resilience to harmful narratives propagated by social media. The lead partner on the project was the Media Diversity Institute, working together with Hashtag Generation as the partner in Sri Lanka.
Goals:
- To raise awareness of the scope and focus of coordinated hate speech and disinformation campaigns in the Sinhala, Tamil and English online space
- To equip young social media users with the skills and tools to judge the veracity of content and challenge agenda-driven narratives
- To hold social media platforms accountable for enforcing and updating their community standards
The project aimed at deploying a team of three media monitors to record incidents of hates speech, ethno-nationalist discourse, and false news. Hate speech mapping was done based on these results, and findings was reported accordingly. The project has also run workshops for CSOs in Sri Lanka on recognizing and responding to hate speech online, and also disseminate trilingual communications that challenge hate speech and disinformation.
This project was designed based on the successful Get The Trolls Out! project.
Timeframe: 01/2021 to 03/2024
Region/Country: Sri Lanka
Lead partner: Media Diversity Institute
Parner: Hashtag Generation
