Discover how social media, in this case, YouTube, played a critical role in shaping the Aragalaya protests in Sri Lanka and ultimately driving social change.

The “Aragalaya” also meaning struggle protests in Sri Lanka marked a defining moment in the country's history. People took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the government and its cause to an economic crisis. However, the protests were not confined to the streets alone.

Social media platforms played a pivotal role in spreading the message of the Aragalaya movement to a wider audience. In our previous analysis, we examined the Aragalaya on Facebook.

But Facebook isn’t the only game in town. Web rankings routinely show YouTube as being more accessed than Facebook in Sri Lanka, and in this case YouTube was one of the most used platform to widespread news, analysis, and personal stories related to the protests.

In this article, we’ll delve into the nature of the content that was spread on YouTube related to the Aragalaya protests and how it compared with conventional news organizations. We will also examine how effective people were in sharing this content and the role it played in shaping public opinion.

We use the YouTube Data API to collect the data we needed for our analysis. Of the publicly accessible data we sampled the data which had top views and interactions and obtained channel information, video content, engagement metrics such as views likes, shares and comments. We limited our analysis to the data available on YouTube from April 1, 2022 to Dec 31, 2022, which was the peak period of the Aragalaya protests.

We began by identifying the most popular and relevant YouTube channels related to the Aragalaya protests. Our priority was also to focus on content generated from within Sri Lanka to better study the people involved in the events. The term “Aragalaya”, being of Sinhalese origin and primarily used in the context of the mass protests in Sri Lanka, proved to be worthy of incorporation in the search query on YouTube for relevant results.

Queries of interest

Some general observations and hypotheses from the above:

Of all above search queries the most relevant to the subject of interest is the keyword Aragalaya|අරගලය|அரகலய and most results were originating from Sri Lanka specific channels. From the 164916 results that show up for the query of interest, we sorted by viewCount and view the top 477 results.

There are a total of 237 unique Channels that have uploaded these 477 videos and below is a brief summary on each channel and how they contributed to the context of the Aragalaya.