By Niresh Eliatamby
With one more election expected in 2026 for the nine provincial councils, to complete the quarter of national elections of Sri Lanka, it is pertinent to focus once again on the often critical role of misinformation and disinformation on the democratic process. For while Sri Lankan voters have largely pushed this issue to the backs of their minds, recent examples abound globally to remind us that this remains a crucial challenge.
German accusations of Russian meddling
A few days ago, a war of words erupted between the governments of Germany and Russia – the former making the accusation of interference in its January 2025 elections; and the latter denying the charge. The Russian ambassador was officially summoned to the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin for a dressing down. Russia’s denials notwithstanding, Germany vowed to retaliate in conjunction with its allies.
As per the Federal Foreign Office, Russian government-affiliated hackers carried out an operation known as Storm 1516, which unloaded disinformation and misinformation on two candidates – Robert Habeck of the Green Party and Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union. Merz is now chancellor.
Fancy Bear strikes again
This August, the Fancy Bear Russian hacker group, which is affiliated with Russia’s GRU intelligence agency and featured in several major foreign elections, was again in the news for purportedly carrying out a cyberattack that disrupted activities at the Bonn airport.
Germany is not of course, the first nation to make such accusations with regard to elections. Over the last year, both the UK and Romania made similar accusations. As far back as 2016, Fancy Bear and other organizations associated with the Russian Government were accused of meddling in the U.S. Presidential Election.
New frontier of regime change
Russia is not of course alone in trying to create chaos in the electoral processes of rival nations. From China to India to the United States, regime change through influencing of elections has been a long-time accusation, long before the advent of social media.
Nor is election meddling through cyberspace limited to the great powers and their global power struggles.
Meddling in Sri Lanka’s elections
Sri Lankans are no strangers to misinformation and disinformation. The 2019 Presidential Election drew widespread accusations of online meddling, including the use of influencers, foreign organizations and bots ; Subsequent elections witnessed major online campaigns swaying the electorate, while parties that didn’t operate well in the cybersphere lost ground.
A report by Hashtag Generation pointed out two critical disinformation campaigns on Facebook immediately prior to the 2024 presidential election with regard to postal voting days before the actual vote count, when claims were made that 92% of state employees had voted for Anura Kumara Dissanayake, and 55% of military had done so in favor of Ranil Wickremesinghe.
There was a time when mis and disinformation included fake surveys that showed a party or candidate in the lead during a campaign. But this would appear to be fairly pedestrian when one considers the sophistication of social media today.
The misogynic aspects of online mis and disinformation during election campaigns have been well-documented and is most troubling. Women candidates are the subject of scurrilous campaigns regarding everything from their sexual orientation to their marital fidelity. The Conversation in an April 2025 Op-Ed noted that 86% of replies to tweets of Canadian women MPs during an election campaign contained some form of harassment.
Equally troubling is the ability of mis and disinformation to target ethnic or religious minorities. Given the torrid history of many of Sri Lanka’s political parties in inciting violence against such minorities, very real threats remain in terms of safety of communities.a
Judicial processes being too slow
Sri Lanka now has a brand-new law – the highly controversial Online Safety Act No. 9 of 2024, and other legislation available to order the takedown of offending material, and if necessary to prosecute offenders. But even tracing the creator of an army of bots, who may be sitting in St. Petersburg, Cebu City or Timbuktu, far from the reach of authorities in affected small nations, or even large ones, is not easy, let alone extraditing them and prosecuting them.
In any case, by the time the long arm of the law is awakened from its slumber, much of the damage is already done.
Bots, AI and Deepfakes
Technological advances that led to programs that can write other programs led to armies of bots being unleashed across social media, which have created much mayhem much faster than human mischief.
Prior to the AI era, one required a human being to write or draw or edit the mis and disinformation, which could be a painstaking process. No longer. AI-generated images and videos are now the norm, something that most teenagers are now quite proficient in. Simply dictate to your AI program the parameters of your requirement, and you can have whatever you wish, conjuring up scandalous speeches and visuals of people, that simply never happened. It’s like rubbing the magic lamp and making a wish to an evil genie; except that in many cases those making the wishes may be the wrongdoers, and the genie doesn’t know any better.
Influencer-led disinformation
The deliberate use of high-profile influencers to spread mis and disinformation is becoming a regular practice. Star-struck audiences are apt to believe much of what their idols say, and these influencers often count their followers in the millions.
With the proliferation of social media influencers, the armies of bots have now been supplemented by armies of influencers.
Meanwhile, fact-checking organizations suffer from significant funding issues, and operate at minimal level of activity or have shut down altogether, including in Sri Lanka. They also cannot match the speed and reach of misinformation and propaganda,
Social media platforms have significantly reduced funding and staff whose responsibility is to root out disinformation and misinformation. Particularly at fault here is X (Twitter), which adopted a free-for-all attitude regarding mis and disinformation following its acquisition by Elon Musk.
Carried away by the tide
Among this sea of mis and disinformation, genuine journalists also get carried away in the pressure to rack up more views for their stories online, and become guilty of exaggeration or unprofessional editing. This of course brings with it the very real danger of lawsuits and even prison terms, depending on the country they operate in, for unlike nameless faceless bots and AI, a journalist is a very real person and his media outlet is easily located.
The most recent development in this area is the lawsuit by U.S. President Donald Trump, who is claiming the colossal sum of US$ 10 billion from the BBC for an unprofessional edit of Trump’s speech on January 6, 2020, shortly before a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, which aired on BBC Panorama. While the BBC has admitted some culpability and apologized to Trump, and both its director general and head of BBC news have resigned, Trump’s lawsuit in the district court of Florida alleges that the action was carried out “intentionally, maliciously and deceptively”.
And it’s not just the BBC. CBS, owned by Paramount, settled Trump lawsuits a few months earlier, to the tune of US$ 16 million. Trump’s legal team had alleged that the decision by CBS to air on 60 Minutes an interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris constituted election interference.
Journalists fighting the tide
Prior to the advent of social media, journalists stood sentinel over the few bridges over which information flowed to the public; gatekeepers of truth and untruth. Not for nothing were journalists known as watchdogs – on radio, television, print media and global wire services.
Unless one was willing to stand in the middle of a town square and shout out one’s message to passersby, it wasn’t easy to reach a mass audience without going through a battery of reporters, subeditors, editors, producers, fact checkers and news directors.
But Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and their ilk opened the floodgates; the lid to Pandora’s Box was lifted forever, and out of it flowed misinformation, disinformation, libel, defamation, online bullying, extortion, and all the other ills of the cyberworld.
While professional journalists do continue to publish properly researched and confirmed stories but these are simply drowned out in the cacophony of noise that flows cross social media.
In this milieu, it is easy for journalists to forget their ethics and swim with the tide. But in a world swirling with manufactured truths, where judicial processes are slow to catch up, the importance of professional journalism is felt more than ever before and be steadfast in their professional duty as arbiters of truth and ethics.
As with any profession, in this rapidly evolving era, it is vital that journalists strengthen their own capabilities, especially in the areas of keeping abreast of the newest technology and trends, and in their own journalistic skills.
Niresh Eliatamby is a long-time investigative journalist based in Colombo, who has significant experience in journalism across a wide range of social media platforms, as well as television, radio, and print media.
This Op-ed was produced under the CIR– FACTUM Media Fellowship Program.
