The Easter Sunday Attack and Banning Social Media – A Reception Analysis

Abstract

Nowadays social media has been important part of one’s life. Social media plays a vital role in transforming people’s life style. It includes social networking sites and blogs where people can easily connect with each other. With that currently media involve many fields including economics, social development and even with war. After the emergence of social media, now each and every field seems a new revolution with in them. The block on social media including Facebook and Whats App and Instagram services have announced by the Sri Lanka government’s official news portal, which cited the spread of “false news reports” online. The main purpose of this research is to find out that how it seems the freedom of expression and freedom of speech in social media after the Easter Sunday attacks. This paper deals with the users of social media and their views on this, so the audience analysis/reception analysis was used as a methodology to analyze. For this reception analysis, the researcher has included all ethnicity of students from University of Jaffna. In that way, the researcher has selected 20 students from each ethnicities, such as Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim, totally altogether 60 students were used as receptions. Questionnaires were distributed among those students and focus group discussions were also conducted by the researcher and those information were used as primary data. Further, research articles, books, journals were used as secondary data. The hypothesis of this research is the freedom of expression and speeches in social media are controlled/limited aftermath the Easter attack. Two-step follow theory and social learning theory were used as the theories of this research. Finally, the conclusion of this research is that, among 60 students 30 students were replied the banned of social media on these time is no need. It is not an essential; even the freedom of expression is limited among its users