“Sri Lanka’s Unending Civil War”, The New York Times

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, a coordinated carnage by suicide bombers in churches and hotels that ended the lives of at least 290 innocents. A little-known Sri Lankan Islamist group has been blamed, but the motive is not yet clear.

But those are details. In reality, we do know. We’ve seen it all, again and again — in Christchurch, Kabul, Paris, New York and far too many other places to list; in churches, mosques, synagogues, schools and squares. As Randy Boyagoda, a Canadian novelist and academic of Sri Lankan ancestry, wrote in an Op-Ed for The Times, the bombings were “terrible, local — and familiar.”

Familiar, of course, to Sri Lankans, whose long and terrible civil war,which ended 10 years ago next month, spawned the diabolical terrorist weapon of the suicide bomber. Many Sri Lankans interviewed after the bombings expressed dismay that horrors they thought had ended had returned with a fearsome vengeance.

On the surface, the Easter attacks had a different local plot than the civil war — the latter was fought along ethnic lines while the attacks were apparently sectarian. But generations reared in violence are likely to have it in their blood, as the New Irish Republican Army, radical heir to republican paramilitaries of Northern Ireland’s long sectarian feud of decades past, demonstrated last week during riots in which the police suspect that a member shot dead a reporter.

Local history alone does not explain the whole of terrorism as we know it today. Nor does any given grievance or cause, even if radical Islam, frequently bred in the violent conflicts of the Middle East, most often appears as the source. The two mosques in New Zealand and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh were shot up by white nationalists; the motive for the deadliest mass shooting in United States history by a lone shooter, the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, remains a mystery.

But there are common denominators, and one encountered ever more frequently is hatred spread over social media. It sadly came as little surprise that soon after the bombings, the Sri Lankan government shut down access to Facebook and other social media services, saying it did so to prevent misinformation from spreading.

Misinformation is hardly the only problem. Again and again, investigators delving into the backgrounds of lone-wolf mass killers or terrorist organizations find online dens of like-minded hatemongers, weaving webs of delusions and lies that snag vulnerable and alienated minds. Copycat crime is hardly new in criminology, but the power of social media has exponentially expanded the reach and speed of such delusion.

In their “Interpreter” column in The Times, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher traced how false rumors disseminated on Facebook in Sri Lanka have led to mob violence and murder. Similar social media disinformation, they wrote, has led to riots and lynchings in Indonesia, India, Mexico and elsewhere in the developing world, with the grisly results posted as tutorials.

Facebook and other social media are not directly responsible for the violence, and monitoring billions of posts around the world in scores of languages is indisputably daunting. But, by all accounts, Facebook has been slow to respond to warnings of the potential for violence in its postings, especially in the local languages of third world countries. And it is in those countries, where institutions are weak or undeveloped, wrote Ms. Taub and Mr. Fisher, that social media has the greatest power to amplify smoldering tribal or religious resentments.

The bombings in Sri Lanka and the many unanswered questions they raise reflect the complexity and variety of passions that drive people, usually young, to embrace terror. The band accused of masterminding the attack, National Thowheeth Jama’ath, will hopefully be neutralized and brought to justice. The terrible images from the churches and hotels of Sri Lanka should also add convincing weight to demands that the powers of social media finally acknowledge and accept their responsibility to block the venom they allow to spread.

The New York Times