Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - None Of This is About Online Safety

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz    Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co    For decades, the Eelam Tamil ethnic group in Sri Lanka has been persecuted. They are dealing with ongoing occupation by the Sri Lankan government, which has also incited violence against Muslims in the country.As tensions have escalated, the government has cracked down on speech, leaning hard into online censorship to censor anyone who questions the authority of the Sri Lankan government. The government has banned social media, passed a restrictive "online safety act" and sought to enact strict controls over what can be said online, all under the guise of "online safety" and curbing "misinformation."ArunAnnow has been covering the persecution of the Eelam Tamil people and the atrocities of the Sri Lankan government. He's an independent journalist and content creator. Today he's joining me to talk about the situation in Sri Lanka and how their "online safety" crusade is serving as a blueprint for authoritarian U.S. laws.Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz          https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0          https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz Grief-Stricken Winds Documentary Website:https://grief-stricken-winds.com/News Sources/Orgs:https://x.com/TamilGuardianhttps://x.com/JDSLankahttps://x.com/lankafileshttps://x.com/PEARL_ActionPeople to Follow:https://x.com/kumanan93https://x.com/ambikasathttps://x.com/JeraThampiOther Resources:https://ptsrilanka.org

They have a very long history of not just, you know, outright persecuting journalists. They have a history of outright killing them, outright making them in Cold War. For decades now, the Elam Tamil ethnic group in Sri Lanka has been persecuted. They've suffered a genocide and are dealing with an ongoing occupation by the Sri Lankan government, which has also incited violence against Muslims in the country. As tensions have escalated, the government has cracked down on speech, leaning hard into online censorship to censor the Elam Tamils and anyone who speaks out on their behalf or questions the authority of the Sri Lankan government.

The government has banned social media at times, passed a restrictive online safety act, and sought to enact strict controls over what can and cannot be said online, all under the guise of online safety and curbing misinformation. Aruna now has been covering the persecution of the Elam Tamil people and the attractive of the Sri Lankan government for years. He's an independent journalist and live streamer, and he's been producing a three-part documentary on the persecution of the Elam Tamil people.

Today, he's joining me to talk about the situation in Sri Lanka and how their online safety crusade is functionally a blueprint for the authoritarian laws that we're seeing right now in the US. Hi, Arun, welcome to Free Speech Friday. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So I feel like a lot of people in the US

are not really up with Sri Lankan politics. Sri Lankan politics and what's been going on. Can you start by just giving a 101 of what's going on in Sri Lanka and what's sort of some of the brief history of what's been happening politically in that country around speech? So for the longest time, Sri Lanka has basically been committing an ongoing side against the Elam Tamils, who are the main ethnic group that lives on the north and east coasts of the island. And they've actually been under military occupation since 2009. There was a 25-year-long war between the various Tamil militant groups that arose as a result of things like the Singhala-only act.

Made the majority language of the island official Singhala and completely removed Tamil made Singhala the only official language. There have been a multitude of ethnic pogroms, most notable of which was the Black July pogroms of 1983, but there was also the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. So basically, the long story short is a lot of what has been happening in short, Sri Lanka is actually very similar to what Israel has been doing to Palestinians. It's just that, in my opinion, Sri Lanka has been doing a much better job of hiding it. Yeah, it's horrible what's going on. I feel like part of the way that they've been able to hide it is by this aggressive internet censorship system that they have.

So back in 2019, Sri Lanka was sort of viral and actually held up by the New York Times and outlets like The Guardian as an example of what a lot of the mainstream media in America I thought the government should be doing, which is blocking access to Facebook, censoring speech. After a series of bombings killed over 300 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday that year, the country's government completely blocked access to all social media sites. So Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube, everything. And they were really praised for this. People were like, wow, it's great to see this country cracking down on misinformation.

Of course, people started to sound the alarm about civil liberties back then. Now in 2024, Sri Lanka has passed the Online Safety Act, which will sound familiar to anybody. I hate all of these online safety acts. It's not what they do, which has been this huge blow to free expression. It has appointed this Online Safety Commission that basically determines what speech is allowed, what speech is not. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of these restrictive Internet laws in Sri Lanka and what freedom of the press looks like in that country? So basically, one of the things that the Online Safety Act does is it basically tries to curb any sort of on speech, especially on sites like Facebook or Twitter or, you know, any of the major news sites that a lot of Sri Lankans use.

And it remains a tool that the government uses to basically monitor online reporting. And so if anything violates that, people can easily be taken in for questioning. The provisions of the Online Safety Act are intentionally vague so as to make sure that the Sri Lankan government can simply, you know, question everyone, anyone that they feel like, basically. So that's effectively what the tool is being used for. It is basically used as a tool to bring in people for questioning. Yeah, or potentially imprison them, it sounds like, you know, with the creation of the online safety act and we're seeing this happen in places like even the UK, right, where you're seeing people charge for terrorism, terrorist statements online. There's tons of examples of this in other countries that have passed these online safety acts where they set up in Sri Lanka, they set up this online safety commission, which basically decides what constitutes prohibited statements. Well, what constitutes prohibited statements by the government is obviously anything expressing sympathy towards marginalized groups.

And clearly, it sounds like the government is not interested in hearing from people that are expressing solidarity with the Elim Tamil people who are suffering. What do you think it's like for journalists operating there? I mean, are we seeing any journalists that are being persecuted and accused of terrorism or accused of violating any of these rules in their coverage already? I mean, just this year, there was a journalist by the name of Kumanan, Kahnabadi, Bile. This is in the year 2025, so this year itself. He was reporting on the excavations of a mass grave in the northern part of Elam, which is a town called Chemani. And, you know, this is a ongoing excavation of remains, right? He basically does his reporting entirely on Twitter.

What happened as a result was the government took him in for questioning on terrorism charges. And they wanted to try and basically book him. They wanted to try and arrest him. and they wanted to silence him. It looked like. Now, thankfully, he had a lawyer with him to make sure that, you know, they couldn't do anything to him because, unfortunately, Sri Lanka does have a very long track record of persecuting members of the press,

which is why many members of the press actually no longer live in the country. They live outside because of that oppressive atmosphere that exists on the island. It's also so interesting that he does the majority of his reporting on Twitter. I feel like we've seen, especially in Southeast Asia, a lot more of an embrace of digital media, people getting a lot more information from WhatsApp, Twitter. We saw this actually in Nepal with their whole, I guess, overthrowing the government after social media bans and stuff.

Can you talk about like people's internet access in Sri Lanka? Like do Sri Lankans rely increasingly on the internet for information? I would say that there's a significant presence of Sri Lankans on Facebook. If you go on Twitter, there is a, you could say a Sri Lankan circle. There's a handful of, you know, very prominent accounts. And they usually follow each other and they're usually friends with each other, that sort of thing. So Twitter is like a very, you know, viable. It is a very thriving outlet for Sri Lankans online.

And increasingly you actually also have a lot of people joining TikTok as well. So you actually do have, because unlike an India, TikTok is not banned in Sri Lanka. So you have a very large increasing adoption of, you know, even newer outlets like TikTok as well. So I would definitely say that there's already a decently high internet adoption on the island and it's increasing as things proceed further. Yeah, it seems like there's this like burgeoning class of influencers and content creators and just people, as you mentioned, like using phones. I was reading about how during this large-scale protest in 2022, a lot of digital and social media platforms played this central role in mobilizing citizens. And this was part of why the government wanted to pass the Online Safety Act is to sort of crack down on this stuff. Their modus operandi is basically making sure that, you know, something like 2022, the what we call the, what we call the, what we call the,

the Ardagalea, it's called the struggle in Singhalese, the Singles language. Their modus operandi is to make sure that nothing like this can ever happen again. And that law was passed by basically members that were loyal to the family that was thrown out in 2022, not members of the family, but politicians that were actually very loyal to the family that was thrown out in 2022. Yeah, and I know in 2022 as well, internet access was cut for countless people and the government also shut down social media for a period of that point two. One thing that the Sri Lankan government seems to be doing with this online safety act, which is something the American government has tried to do to is classify any sort of news they don't like as misinformation.

And so they'll classify, it seems like anything that's challenging government narratives. I'm wondering if you can sort of talk about that in relation to what's happening to the Elam Tamils and the genocide that they're experiencing because I feel like there are so many parallels between this and Gaza. Like when I look at this of just the government saying, oh, no, you're talking about these things. that are happening, you're going there to document these things on Twitter. Well, that's misinformation, and we have a ban on misinformation. And so we are going to make these platforms take that content down. So Sri Lanka has a very long history. As you mentioned, it's very similar to Israel. They have a very long history of outright persecuting journalists. They have a history of outright killing them, outright making them in cold blood. And the relation that this has with the Elam Tumels,

the occupation and the genocide that they've experienced and the occupation that they're still going under right now is that the main fundamental. thing that you really can't question, you know, lest you be considered a terrorist or less you be considered, you know, an enemy of the state is the atrocities and the ongoing atrocities that the government is committing against, you know, the Tamils. So for a great, a great example, within the past several years or so, there, there have been random police detentions, kidnappings, and what we call custodial deaths. Basically, there are people that are arrested, largely Tamils, by the way, that are arrested in Elam by the cops, which are run federally. And, and

they end up dying in prison. You know, they're tortured to death and the parents are actually kept from, you know, seeing their young ones. Nagarasa Alex comes to mind, you know, more recently. But on top of that, a lot of what the Sri Lankan government does is they actually like, they're going online to look for anything that they can just point out to say, this is, you know, terrorism or this is anti-Streluncan activity. They're basically going in and straight up terrorizing them.

So for a great example, just last year at a remembrance ceremony, the police found out that there's a particular place that these women were organizing and they were giving out, you know, kanji, which is like a, you know, rice meal. It's a drink. And what happened immediately after that, this was last year, by the way, they went to those women's houses and they literally physically assaulted them for simply giving out memorial kanji. That's a whole thing that I could get into. But this is the kind of thing that the Sri Lankan government is doing. And as of late today, or the past several, you know, months or so, they've also been harassing journalists that were covering things like the Chemania excavation and whatnot. So this is the kind of thing that they're continuing to do today. They're still harassing journalists. They're still harassing members of the Elam Tamil group that are basically just trying to memorialize that are trying to spread news that are trying to report on the news, so on and so forth. So this problem of a lack of freedom of speech, it is doubly true. It's actually more acute for Elam Tamil specifically because they've always been the enemy of the state. They've always been targets.

I feel like part of also why this situation with the Elam Tamils has not gotten out more is this aggressive censorship. And I mean, everything that you mentioned of just sort of the trawling of social media that leads to a lot of self-censoring, the fact that the government can mandate internet service providers take stuff down. The fact that also these platforms are complying with the Sri Lankan government to censor speech, whether it's Twitter, meta, etc. I'm just so appalled. Like when I go back and look at the coverage of their. original social media ban back in 2019.

At how many liberal journalists in the U.S. were praising it? Like I mentioned earlier, you had The Guardian, I guess that's British, but American journalists saying, you know, Sri Lanka and social media blackout reflects that online dangers outweigh the benefits. And then, you know, you had this online opinion piece by Kara Swisher in the New York Times saying Sri Lanka shut down social media. My first thought was good. That's ridiculous.

It's obscene. And then she says, good because it could save lives. Good because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they've built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them. And she just goes on and on. And I just am appalled by this. And then, you know, I feel like without pieces like this in the New York Times, right, like by major tech journalists. and the Guardian and all these other places, I don't think they would have been able to pass something like the Online Safety Act, right? Like, it's sort of this long thing of like, oh, you have Western powers now praising them for this authoritarianism. The liberal media in the U.S., literally praising them for these extremely authoritarian censorship actions.

And so I'm kind of curious, like, what your thoughts are watching that happen in the U.S. of like, not only are people ignorant of this genocide that's happening. And obviously, like, you know, a lot of the violence in 2019 was against Muslims, but it seems like people are so ignorant of the political landscape of this country. And yet, here they are, praising this government for their authoritarian censorship. And that was just the beginning of it. I mean, I was not aware of the headlines that you just described to me from the New York Times or the Guardian. But I've interviewed and I've worked with journalists that currently are in exile that live in, you know, Europe as a result of the longstanding persecution of journalists that the Sri Lankan government has engaged in.

So the idea that the Sri Lankan government is combating misinformation is an absolutely absurd notion. It's always been crafting a narrative of these are the facts that we want you to understand. And anything that goes contrary to this, anything that could question our brave troops, anything that can question what we've been doing to a particular group of people, that's terrorism. So the idea that Sri Lanka could ever be held up as a bastion of journalism has to be one of the most laughable things I've ever heard in my life. I feel like it just speaks to, unfortunately, so many liberal pundits, especially tech pundits, is sort of like this really ignorant view they have of the internet, where they sort of just think, oh, well, you know, misinformation is bad. And if we could just get these governments to crack down hard enough, like we wouldn't have misinformation.

I don't know what kind of journalists these people are because any smart journalism, like is not that credulous and knows that the government lies all the time, like not just Trump, Biden. Governments lie that they're political systems. They have lots of reasons to lie, especially in Sri Lanka's case, they have plenty of reasons to lie. So the idea that if we just give the power of, you know, controlling press and speech to a government, we can actually combat misinformation. I think that is the silliest, most absurd thing I've heard. It's terrifying. And I'm curious, like how you feel kind of watching this happen in Sri Lanka and watching the Online Safety Act. I've been reporting so much on it. They all have the same name. They're all called the Online

Safety Act, right? We have the UK's Online Safety Act. We have one in Ireland. We have Australia. We have America, the Kids Online Safety Act. And all of them are very similar. All of them ultimately give the government power and the authority to censor speech online. And they sort of establish this top-down governmental censorship, you know, system of speech on the internet. So seeing, you know, what you know about Sri Lanka and how much you know about the way that these online safety laws are weaponized to not do anything related to online safety and said to censor, you know, journalism, how does it feel living in America now and watching some of these similar laws come to fruition in America or potentially come to fruition? A lot of this stuff that I'm talking about in Sri Lanka is actually very applicable to much of the Indian subcontinent. So India, Pakistan, Bangladesh has done very similar things that Sri Lanka has done. the Tamils. I think what really clicked in my head that, oh, this is how things are devolving is

when the disappearances started happening. Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of enforced disappearances in the world. I think it is either the first or second. So seeing what America has been doing, what the Trump administration has been doing, reminded me a lot of what a lot of these strong men in in in the subcontinent, the Indian subcontinent, you know, leaders like Mahindar Rajapaksa, who's the Benjamin Netanyahu of Sri Lanka, this curbing of free speech, this thing of if you don't listen to the government, you're a terrorist, you're an anti-American, you're this, you're that. One of the things that I say all the time on my broadcast and in my documentaries in my videos is that states use the exact same playbook. It's the same exact playbook.

They trade notes for sure. 100% they trade notes. But if you're engaged, in any form of statecraft and making sure that you don't have any insurgencies or insurrections in your state you're going to be pulling out all the stops and those stops that they're pulling out usually end up being the exact same ones so it's usually you know passing bills like online safety act or you know saving the children or curbing terrorism or anti-terrorism they usually pass one of these acts it's a way to spy on citizens it's a way to curb the freedom of the press it's a way of making sure that you can not voice your opinion on, you know, things that are pretty obviously happening to anyone, right?

It's a way of curbing any form of speech against the government. I would say that we haven't entirely reached, you know, Roger Pax's levels of censorship and disappearances yet, but those sort of same measures rhyme, in my opinion. I think it's such a good point. I mean, you mentioned India as well. When I was reading this report from Reporters Without Borders, they talked about actually India and Sri Lanka are two of the most hostile environments for journalists. They hold their worst scores for press freedom on the Press Freedom Index since 2014.

And actually Sri Lanka is ranked 100 50th on press freedom, especially since 2022 when there was these uprising. So, and they note actually journalists, specifically Tamil journalists and Muslim minorities risk these coordinated attacks and cyber attacks. It sounds like they have the Internet weaponized against them as well. And that really struck a chord for me hearing about the attacks on these minorities because not only do you have the government, the top-down censor, happening, the online safety stuff. But I feel like in so many of these instances, you also have these online armies of government supporters or people bot networks or other sort of crowdsourced harassment

and deplatforming of journalists that's happening. I'm wondering if you've seen any of that. This is something that you see in much of the subcontinent, but especially in Sri Lanka, India. You have people that are on basically party payrolls, like political party payrolls, whose entire existence is to basically spread misinformation and act as like troll bot farms

for the most right-wing, you know, reactionary nationalist rhetoric. And you see this very acutely in Sri Lanka with regards to the Rajapaksas. And I think you also have a decent amount of people that engage in similar behavior for the UNP and SJB. In India, the BJP's IT cell is, I think, the largest IT cell on the planet. I think it is, if I'm not mistaken, it is one of the largest bot farms on the planet. So the misinformation, you know, army is 1,000% a tool that these right-wing authoritarians use all the time to either spread misinformation or they'll often stalk someone, they'll often look for someone's location and they'll go and harass them or even worse, right? This is a very tried and tested tool of, you know, government suppression or party-based suppression even. So this is a very common tool that's used in the subcontinent for sure, but especially in Sri Lanka.

I think you see also how these laws are weaponized, even just looking at the very first arrest that happened in February 2024 after the Online Safety Act passed was an individual who's accused of running a smear campaign against the Sri Lankan government. And in this report on Lincoln Law, it says this case marked a significant moment in the enforcement of the Online Safety Act, which was enacted to counter the spread of disinformation. The suspect was arrested by the Criminal Investigations Department faces charges related to misinformation. which is so scary that you can be charged by a government for misinformation. It just shows that there's like no free speech. And I don't know what kind of stuff that guy was saying, but he should have the right to express himself online. I mean, again, I don't know the details of this case.

I think it's just one of many. Like, it seems like there's many instances since of, you know, the government essentially declaring any information they don't like as misinformation as we were sort of talking about. Yeah. I mean, this is a longstanding tradition of the Sri Lankan government. That's just continuing to today. Nothing's really changed all that much.

What would you suggest people do that are just learning about what's going on in Sri Lanka and what the Elam Tamils are dealing with with this ongoing occupation and the suffering that they've had and just the widespread censorship, the fact that a lot of these people, unlike maybe Palestinians in the West Bank, who have at least free access to their phones somewhat, you know, it sounds like these Tamils can't necessarily document even the atrocities that are happening because there's so much censorship of speech. Aside from yourself, like, are there any people, you know, that are talking about this? Or what can people do to.

kind of like learn a little bit more and to fight for online expression. Okay, so I would say the big, the two big ones would be Tamil Guardian and JDS, Journalists for Democracy Sri Lanka. Those are the two big ones I would recommend. And what do you think people in America should learn from what happened with the Online Safety Act in Sri Lanka and these efforts to curb misinformation and seeing these safety laws weaponized? I mean, what lessons do you think we could take here to get involved to protect online speech? I guess there's a sort of belief that a lot of people in America have. where it's like oh it's happening so far away it can't can't possibly happen here right oh it's happening in india it's happening in Sri Lanka's country like really tiny country in the middle of indian ocean it can't happen

here and the truth of the matter is that the difference between america and a country like india for example is that india doesn't have the sort of veneer of respectability politics that that america has been soaked in for a very long time but actually the funny thing is sri lanka does to a certain extent Sri Lanka does have that veneer of respectability politics. Everything that has happened in Sri Lanka could very easily happen here. There have been people that have been direct, you know, victims of the state, black people, indigenous people, also other immigrants, Muslims, Latino people, all sorts of different ethnic minorities.

And if it can happen to them, it can happen to even the most privileged. So now is the right time to voice against these online safety acts and these very restrictive internet laws. I think there's such a like a racism too and like this sort of stigmatizing of a lot of South Asian countries or just countries where it's not majority white people where they're like, oh, those are crazy authoritarian. Like when we do one of these online safety acts or when we pass authoritarian speech laws that censor journalism, like we have this like enlightened, you know, government of a democratic government or whatever, whatever. And I think like what you said earlier, of just like all states are the same in some ways. And like government is government.

And also, if you think the American government is more responsible than a lot of these other authoritarian governments, like you're delusional because we're already seeing censorship play out in real time, especially under Trump. I feel like liberals have kind of gotten that through their head with Trump. But what they don't understand is actually it's both political parties that are aligned in terms of censorship. So I think you just made so many great points. Arun, thank you so much for joining and for talking to me about all of this stuff. And I really encourage everybody who's watching to follow your work and the documentaries. you've been producing. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to talk about a country and, you know, an issue that most people have probably never heard of in their

life. So I appreciate you using your platform in this way. So I can't thank you enough. That's it for this week's free speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.com. on Substack. I have no brand deals right now. So I rely 100% on support from people like you. Every single dollar makes such a difference and ensures that I can keep my Free Speech Friday series going and continue to produce all of the journalism that I produce on this channel and this podcast feed. So thank you so much again. And I will be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday.