The Galle Face Protest (2022) in Sri Lanka and Social Media Activism through Facebook

Abstract

The public uprising that took place in the year 2022 in Sri Lanka mainly in the Galle Face esplanade in the Colombo Fort administrative area against the then government headed by President Gotabhaya Rajapaksha was a major public uprising in the Sri Lankan history and it is identified here as the Galle Face protest (2022). An anti-government protest of this scale, which ran for several months, needed good communication among the activists and social media played a major role in this regard. The goal of this research was to evaluate the impact of the social media platform Facebook as a medium of communication in the initiation and development of the Galle Face protest. The study examined how activists used the social medium Facebook as a tool to shape public opinion by instigating people at the outset and during the development of the protest. Views of the activists in this regard were examined and based on them; recommendations were made on how to use Facebook as an effective as well as responsible mode of communication for political activism. For this qualitative analysis of data collected from fifteen protesters through interviews were used as primary data and records on the protest and reports on global protests were used as secondary data. Data contributors were selected and interviewed using purposive and snowball sampling methods of non-probability sampling technique. The data were analysed based on nine main themes under thematic analysis, including creating communication networks, motivation, building self-interest, protection of activists, etc. The findings revealed that Facebook played a main role in the initiation and dissemination of the Galle Face protest and thus Facebook worked as an effective medium of communication for the success of the protest. In contrast, conventional media in the form of television and newspapers owned and controlled by the government failed against the protest while the privately owned such media stayed away from the fray giving in to the onslaught of social media.