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

The Aragalaya was an interesting phenomenon: a citizen uprising comprised of over 600+ individual protests (see our protest tracker here). Much of the conversation happened on social media: on Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube and Twitter.

We decided to examine how the conversation around the Aragalaya worked on Facebook. Using the keywords “අරගලය” OR “போராட்டம்” OR “Aragalaya”, we were able to download 223,926 posts that was published within the timeframe of April 1 2022 to January 1 2023. These posts received a total of twenty five million interactions.

Given the large number of interactions, we decided to focus our analysis on an initial sample of 71,760 posts that appeared within the timeframe of April 1 2022 to May 1 2022. In-depth analysis reveals 10,298,824 interactions: essentially, a microscope onto the conversation about the Aragalaya during the events of the Aragalaya itself.

Here’s what we found out:

1) the pages and groups that most influenced the conversation, including patterns such as the rise of individuals in protest discourse

2) the relative lackluster engagement seen by traditional media in the coverage

3) overall sentiment towards the protests based on random sampling and top-50 sampling

4) types of content as well as administrator locations

We looked at the pages that appeared in these posts, the number of posts they have in our dataset, and the number of views they got across these posts.

We were able to pinpoint 2173 pages and groups, with the top entry (Ratta) having 1,315,433 interactions and the bottom entry (Unesco World Heritage Sites in Danger) having just 1. For the sake of analysis, we present entries with more than 1000 interactions in Appendix A.

Analysis of the top 20 reveals an interesting pattern that persists throughout the dataset.

What we see here in the top 20 is that pages that were not large, classical media organizations overwhelmingly received the most amount of views for their protest-related content. Of particular interest are Ratta, 1000 Talk "තව්සන් ටෝක්”, President Uncle -ජනාධිපති බාප්පා, Pathum Kerner, GoHomeGota2022, Dasatha Lanka News (a new digital-first media outlet that appears to disclose little information other than an email and a whatsapp number; on Facebook, it has 13 page admins in Sri Lanka and 3 in Qatar) and Anuruddha Bandara. Hiru News, Ada Derana Sinhala, Newsfirst - some of the largest media properties in the country - come in at #9, 11 and 12 respectively.

The inclusion of Newsfirst Tamil is a strong indicator of the engagement of the country’s Tamil population here. Ordinarily, most content top 20s are invariably Sinhala. Here, the majority of content is Sinhala, but Newsfirst Tamil’s presence highlights the importance of trilingual journalism.

The view counts for non-media channels - i.e.: activists, influencers, unregistered digital media operations, meme pages - far outnumber the combined reach of classical media, indicating a major shift in the digital landscape.

A probe into Facebook’s categories for each of these 2173 pages and groups reveals a breakdown of 139 sub-types (see Appendix B). The top 20 here again shows us that it is predominantly individuals driving the conversation. DIGITAL_CREATOR and PERSON categories were able to garner far more interactions with far fewer posts than MEDIA_NEWS_COMPANY and NEWS_SITE categories, signifying far more reach for individuals than for legacy media.

The single most amount of interactions for a post goes to a video by Sachini Chathurangi, who appears to be some sort of Facebook personality.

However, overall posts are dominated by Ratta. Of the top five most interacted posts, Ratta occupies 3 slots. Of the top 20, he occupies 10 slots.

This pattern holds true even for video content. Video typically demands higher production effort than images and text. Classical media organizations typically have more footage to share. But even here, the top three are smaller efforts and activists, with 1000 Talk "තව්සන් ටෝක්" in particular putting out more video content than Ada Derana Sinhala. Once again, the presence of Newsfirst Tamil highlights the importance of trilingual content.

It seems, therefore, that the people’s revolution was indeed a people’s revolution - at least as far as Facebook is concerned.

The overwhelming majority of popular content is positive towards the Aragalaya. This statement held true for both the top 50 posts as well as 3 random samples of the top 300 posts. Even news-bulletin style posts such as “අද 2022.04.17 පෙ.ව. 6.20 පමණ ගෝටාගෝගම ගාල්ල ශාකාව පොලීසිය විසින් විනාශ කර” appear to be from a pro-protest perspective.

We were able to find a video from Iraj posted at 2022-04-14 20:28:17 IST, but that content is now deleted or hidden; only its metadata remains. Groups such as BRING BACK GOTA show up, but instead of support for Rajapaksas, their content is overwhelmingly supportive of the protests.

This is not the say that negative content does not exist. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Facebook page appears in an effort to blame the protest for the country’s misfortunes. However, predominantly, the conversation that has the most engagement is pro-protest: for example, in a popular post, Sarath Fonseka calls up[on Shavendra Silva (his successor) to “think a hundred thousand times before acting on the illegal orders given by corrupt people to suppress the extremely peaceful civil struggle arising in the country at this moment.”

By measuring the amount of ‘Angry’ reactions to a post, we’re able to gauge some measure of public ire. Of all pages, these were the top 20 of pages that saw the public reacting angrily to their content. The number in the middle is the number of reactions.

In contrast, these are the pages whose content was most-loved.

The appearance of the same entry in both lists is easily explainable. Some pages, such as President Uncle -ජනාධිපති බාප්පා, served as news bulletins. On the other hand, attempts by the Rajapaksa and affiliated pages to discredit the protest were met with anger; note how none of those pages appear in the most-loved top 20.

By far the predominant mode of communication was photos; over 4 times more prevalent than text statuses, more than 10 times more than links. Next comes video.

One of the criticisms levelled at the protests by Sri Lankan politicians were that they were foreign influence operations. Digging into the admins and their country of origin (determined by a person’s information and activity on Facebook), we were able to extract the Page Admin Top Country metric - i.e.: The country that hosts the most number of Page managers. We then sorted them by the interactions they received.

As expected, the majority of admins are from Sri Lanka. However, a substantial number are from Namibia and Australia, with lesser amounts from South Korea, Japan, Finland, Italy and Great Britain. The presence of Namibia is unexplained, even among conspiracy theories. Namibia generated more posts than Sri Lanka (3474 vs 3291) but had roughly 1/9th of the interaction of the Sri Lankan posts in total. Further examination is warranted.

In conclusion we were able to identify several interesting facts regarding the social media influence and content patterns in the protest discourse, in Facebook.

The most important of these to note are the strong influences to conversations made through pages and groups unrelated to traditional media. This is a clear indication of patterns such as the rise of individuals (i.e.: activists, influencers, unregistered digital media operations, meme pages) in protest discourse. This shows a major shift in the digital landscape and the decline in influence of traditional media can be attributed to the relatively lackluster engagement in their coverage.

The overall sentiment towards the protests based on random sampling and top-50 sampling indicates a strong positive tone. The use of photos and videos seem to garner the most number of interactions than text. The increase in engagement of Sri Lanka’s Tamil population is also noteworthy.

In looking at foreign influences it was interesting to find that Namibia generated more posts than Sri Lanka. Even though Sri Lankan page admins gain more engagement, we believe that this warrants for further investigation.