In one of the most seminal stories in recent history, Lewis Carroll wrote the following response when Alice, in her expeditions through Wonderland, asked why a Tiger-lily spoke so boldly when no other flower in any other garden could even talk: “In most gardens,” the Tiger-lily said, “they make the beds too soft – so that the flowers are always asleep.”

The digital age we live in now is a dangerous and defining one. The gardens of our land are employing methods far more intricate than delusions of complacency. The conditions of our inaction are born not out of a lack of will or frailty of soul, but inevitability: a paralysing fear that what’s to come is too complex and too powerful to do anything against.

Social media and consequences

Social media carried the torch as platforms like Facebook and Twitter grew to heights unprecedented at speeds unfathomable. These new technologies not only drastically altered the way we live, but actively characterised how we think and interact with our communities.

With the instant connectivity between long distance friends and family, real-time updates of news on the ground, or the opportunity to broadcast your capabilities to be competitive on the job market, we quickly realised that the risk of not participating in this vast digital world had catastrophic, real-world ramifications.

In a lot of ways, they shone a light on the best of us: from teenage influencers expressing their marginalised identities to grassroots activists mobilising their coworkers to rally against unjust labour practices, social media provided a megaphone for the voiceless and a proxy for change to the hopeful.

But while the good now had a way to become great, the bad was similarly amplified to become worse. Racist and sexist ideologies and rampant harassment fuelled the widening of existing disparities. Hard truths and incendiary fictions were thrust into the same news cycles in order to optimise for engagement and virality. 

And now we see the direct consequences in the degradation of democratic processes worldwide, as authoritarian regimes employ draconian measures of silencing opposition, spreading disinformation, and surveilling any indication of resistance.

Betraying fundamental human rights

Here in Sri Lanka we are currently witnessing a deliberate effort by the Government to pass a law that will betray fundamental human rights. Through the establishment of overreaching Executive powers and broad measures rife with opportunities for abuse, the proposed Online Safety Bill introduces a dangerous path in which people in power have free reign to exploit those who oppose them.

While this bill may seem as if it possesses regulation on online harassment, child abuse, and disinformation, it is packaged with provisions that ask us to surrender our right to protest, ultimately sacrificing our freedom of expression. 

Even the protections from hate speech and security threats have the potential to be turned on its head when the wrong person interprets them as dissent. Phrases like “national security” and “distress” are thrown around without meaning or context, implying that the bill was drafted without the care and intent necessary to combat such a significant problem.

It is important to understand that this is not a new trend: much along the same lines, the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) has time and time again subverted the very nature of the act in upholding human rights by suppressing and incarcerating citizens exercising their rights to free speech. 

Journalists, entertainers, and religious groups have all been targeted under the guise of a treaty that strove to protect them for the very thing they are being locked up for. Through disproportionate punishments to a fundamental lack of understanding of what online safety even constitutes, this sort of repression will not only be extended but amplified once the Online Safety Bill is enacted.

Civil proponents of the bill will argue that the benefits in safety outweigh these potential risks. But safety at the cost of freedom has historically and universally never been a price worth paying. And this is not a price we should have to pay to reap the benefits of the most liberating, technologically forward era in modern history!

Replicating virtues online

But operating within the bounds of these new worlds requires that the virtues we uphold in reality are replicated online. Otherwise, we surrender our rights to actors that continue to prioritise the potential for larger profits over any pursuit of a healthy, inclusive information ecosystem.

The way we perceive any form of resolution influences how we understand the threat. And for many of us, the threat is too obscure, too complicated, too out-of-reach to do anything against. We are the flowers that remain asleep, while the privileged few among us take the wheel in setting up our digital futures.

I want to make it clear that this is not a condemnation of innovation nor a unilateral appeal to virtues of grace and unity. Rather, I propose a strong case for a vision that can both guarantee that the right measures to combat online harms are in place and to strengthen our democracy at large.

Sri Lanka should be using the same civic participatory approach they are employing to oppose the Online Safety Bill as a foundational mechanism to help craft these laws in the first place. At this very moment, civil society activists, journalists, lawyers, influencers, and entertainers are collaborating to collectively petition the bill before it goes to a parliamentary vote.

Important tenets of democracy

This type of grassroots advocacy upholds three important tenets of democracy.

First, the inclusion of diverse voices across society that possess the lived experience and unique perspectives to assess pervasive impact and provide universal scrutiny. When it comes to how each one of us takes advantage of the internet, there are vast differences between a mid-level journalist trying to garner views on groundbreaking local news and an elderly tuk-tuk driver attempting to register through QR codes for fuel rations. It is up to us to ensure that moral action is never undertaken alone and always encompasses stakeholders that feel the most drastic effects of these malicious pursuits.

The second tenet of the framework is the reinforcement of individual agency so that each and every one of us have the power to hold these systems in check. Our dependence on others to do the heavy lifting for us will only comply with existing misconceptions that a happy populace is an ignorant one. We each need to have a strong understanding of the mechanisms that keep us sleeping and build an intuition for resilience.

And finally, we need to persist. Any bid for lasting change dies when righteous convictions become harboured and never expressed. The necessity for relentlessness is a key characteristic of any democracy. Attrition is a most powerful adversary, and one quick to be taken advantage of if left unchecked.

As I pointed out, these principles are already being practised in our current battle against the Online Safety Bill. The endurance and moral capacity of civil actors has kept the fight going during the two-week period of appeal before the final verdict of the higher court. And while there are important lessons to be learned from and for this type of advocacy, it still provides a solid bedrock for future cohesion when faced with draconian legislation.

Alternative measures 

There are alternative measures that encompass this vision and still secure protections on the internet. Foundationally, we need Big Tech companies like Meta and Google to commit to establishing a less precarious pipeline of communication between their regional directors and the Sri Lankan community. 

Through routine check-ins, constant sharing of cultural translations, and connections from contextual violations to pre-existing community standards on these platforms, we can prove to these tunnel-visioned corporations that despite a smaller market share in the grand scheme of things, what happens in Sri Lanka has massive implications for the region at large.

Another opportunity is in building a democratically-elected proxy of our own, composed of representatives from every identity, discipline, province, and socioeconomic background. This proxy can be a virtuous contrast to the overly executive and unilateral Online Safety Commission proposed in the Online Safety Bill. 

Cohesiveness is crucial when we are all fighting the same battle and have similar goals, and this institutionalised form of communication could be extremely efficient in collating perspectives to reach tech companies and forming petitions against unjust laws.

Digital literacy, a popular solution for building civic awareness and privacy protections, is also key in this movement. But only if we adopt a terminology that is culturally reflective and resonant with individuals that do not have the bandwidth to keep up to date with the technicalities of being online. 

In this, we can take advantage of the country’s best storytellers and influencers to convey not only abstract calls for data privacy or against misinformation, but relatable rectitudes of the lived experience of women being harassed on Facebook or rumours being spread about the threat of outsiders.

Continue to fight

All too often, hope and bids for change are thought to be resigned to the privileged, but as we’ve learned in democracies around the globe, idealism is no longer a luxury because access to technology is no longer a luxury. 

Our shared capacity in tweeting our thoughts on the latest episode of ‘The Voice’ or posting a TikTok of our families shamelessly dancing is now a human right, and that especially extends to offering opposing views. Use this power to make your stance against injustices heard – show people in power that they cannot get away with compromising basic human rights.

And so we must continue to fight. We fight for the universal pervasiveness of civil liberties in the digital information realm. We fight against the online amplification of autocracy and disparity. We fight the systemic suppression of free speech and we fight the voices that take that right for granted to incite violence and intensify discrimination.

(The writer is a researcher, activist, writer, and technologist with a background in community organising for tech policy, global health, education reform, clinical psychology, and social change in a number of countries around the globe, including the US, Nepal, South Africa, and India. He is currently a visiting researcher at Factum)