By Mohamed Harees –

“Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and  fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.”– Lester B. Pearson

Sri Lanka’s Muslims have lived through a few decades of organised hostility, and it has found a new home online. Sinhala nationalist networks have long stirred suspicion against the community. Today, a series of recent events, some domestic and some far away, is fuelling a fresh wave of social media abuse. Whether the government, with a determination to rid the country of its racist politics, can repair the enormous damage done by decades of past failures, is one of the country’s most important challenges.

Even at the risk of repetition, the story needs telling. In the years after the war ended in 2009, anti-Muslim campaigning moved from the margins into public life under successive administrations. Organised groups held rallies against Muslim religious practices and businesses, while rumour and innuendo did most of the work. Ordinary commerce was described as conspiracy, and ordinary piety as extremism. The pattern turned deadly on multiple occasions, with Muslim homes and shops burned and lives lost in coordinated attacks. Mobs attacked Muslim neighbourhoods in different parts of the country.

Then came the Easter Sunday bombings of April 2019, which killed more than 250 people, carried out by an extremist Muslim cult, about whom the community had sounded alarms to the authorities concerned on many occasions in the past. The horror of that day was compounded by what followed. Despite such warnings, Muslims across the country were told, openly or by implication, to carry a guilt that belonged only to the men who planned and carried out the attacks. Shops were boycotted, mosques were attacked, and mobs rampaged through Muslim neighbourhoods. Subsequently, State policies enacted during the pandemic, including the forced cremation of Muslim COVID-19 victims against the community’s religious practice and international health guidance, showed how deeply suspicion had entered official decision-making. It was later reversed, but the injury remained. Those who instigated riots or were responsible for discriminatory policies were never brought to justice.

Racist monks and movements which specifically targeted Muslims were allowed to carry out well-orchestrated hate campaigns, led by hate monks, among whom Gnanasara (T) was most prominent for his hateful rhetoric. Sri Lankan courts have convicted Gnanasara more than once and later released; yet the wider movement he symbolised has kept its audience. Gotabhaya even made Gnanasara the Chair of the One Country–One Law committee. Many Muslims believed then, and still believe, that the Sri Lankan state was too slow to protect them, and too hesitant to punish those who attacked them. None of those who instigated those riots or were responsible for the forced cremation policy was brought to justice.

Recent news has given the old campaigners fresh material. Reports say a Sri Lankan man named Anojan has been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia on a blasphemy charge. Though Muslims found the post he made in a Sri Lankan FB group about their Prophet (S) most offensive, they have been part of many collective initiatives to save Anojan from this harsh punishment. This is not, though, a solitary incident. Defaming Islam, its symbols, attire and the Prophet (S) and spreading fake news has been a sport for many hate groups, especially in Sinhala.  In this context, online nationalists have been quick to hold Sri Lankan Muslims responsible for a foreign court’s decision, as if they had any say in it. Reports of long prison terms handed down to fifteen Muslims over links to the Easter attacks also led to a stream of hateful rhetoric on social media. The court process is a matter of law. It has nothing to do with the guilt of a community of nearly two million people, and yet the same accounts now use the verdicts to demand that every Muslim atone.

A third strand is more recent still. A group of Sri Lankan journalists a few months ago travelled to Israel on a sponsored visit, and their coverage since has been falling in line with Israeli official messaging, the practice commonly known as hasbara. The details of who paid and what was promised to deserve proper reporting, and sponsored trips are a familiar tool of public diplomacy everywhere. Journalists can and should be able to visit any country and report what they see. The concern is transparency. Readers are entitled to know who funded a trip, and where they were taken to and not taken to. In terms of this Hasbara trip, it was clear when looking at the online consequences: Sri Lankan Muslims who voice solidarity with Palestinians are being painted as extremists, or as disloyal, by accounts that link a humanitarian cause to terrorism. Sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians, shared by people of every faith and none across Sri Lanka and around the world, has been turned into evidence against one community.

This is where the present government’s promise matters. The National People’s Power administration, elected in 2024, has said it will not let racism rise again. Muslims are feeling the positive effects of this laudable pledge, and that is welcome. But Sri Lanka’s history of communal violence makes it urgent to work further on the pledge, to make all communities feel included. But the far-right networks are operating where the law is weakest, on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and messaging groups, and in Sinhala-language posts that moderators abroad seldom understand. A speech at a rally can be prosecuted. A million shares of a fabricated rumour are much harder to pursue. In January 2026 alone, social media monitors recorded 308 incidents of harmful speech, a 14.76% increase from December 2025. Of these, 153 were reported to Facebook, 119 to TikTok, and 34 to YouTube. Hate speech targeting Sri Lankan Muslims has been driven by international tensions, including those between Israel and Iran, the conflict in Palestine, and events in Bangladesh, which have seen tensions between Buddhist and Muslim communities.

Sri Lanka is not alone in facing these challenges, and the consequences of allowing racist policies and cultures to persist are visible across Asia, Europe and the United States. In Myanmar, the 1982 Burma Citizenship Law arbitrarily deprived the Rohingya Muslim population of nationality, rendering them stateless. Social media was then used to generate hate speech against the Rohingya, reinforcing the idea of ‘the threat posed by Muslims and the Rohingya to the Burmese race and the Buddhist religion’. Academic research has shown a direct link between hate speech found on platforms like Facebook and the escalation of violence and atrocities against the Rohingya population, including genocide. Enabling Islamophobic hate speech both through public approval and governmental policies perpetuated the persecution and displacement of an entire community.

In India, similar patterns have emerged. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act grants citizenship to ‘illegal’ immigrants from neighbouring countries who arrived before 2014 while excluding Muslim populations. Islamophobic hate speech has been instrumental in excluding Muslims from the National Register of Citizens for Assam, rendering many effectively stateless. Viewing and portraying Muslims with hostility facilitates the production and continuation of statelessness for members of these communities. The Delhi High Court has recognised that hate speech against the Rohingya community on social media platforms constitutes a crime, yet enforcement remains inconsistent.

In Europe, the response to hate speech has been shaped by historical experiences with totalitarian regimes and genocide. The European Union has adopted regulations that oblige companies to remove offensive content, including hate speech, once it is brought to their attention. A 2018 German law requires large social media platforms to take down posts that are ‘manifestly illegal’ within twenty-four hours. The EU’s Digital Services Act, which recently entered into force, requires large platforms to remove illegal content, including hate speech, within reasonable timeframes under the threat of financial penalties. These measures reflect a policy choice that protection from hate speech takes precedence over unrestricted freedom of expression, given the catastrophic consequences of unchecked incitement in Europe’s history.

The United States presents a different approach, rooted in First Amendment protections. Hate speech is fully protected unless it falls under narrow exceptions such as true threats, incitement to violence, or defamation. Social media platforms have broad latitude to set their own content standards and enforcement methods, stemming from the Communications Decency Act, which exempts tech platforms from liability for actionable user speech. This approach has been criticised for enabling the spread of harmful content, yet it reflects a constitutional commitment to free expression even when it causes offence. Critics argue that much has been written about possible improvements to hate speech regulation in the United States, but most suggestions ignore the constraints of First Amendment jurisprudence.

The lessons for Sri Lanka are clear. First, failure to confront hate speech and racist policies carries profound humanitarian costs, including statelessness, displacement and violence. Second, social media amplifies these risks, with research showing a direct link between online hate speech and physical violence against minorities. Third, legal frameworks matter: amending and implementing existing laws is seen as an effective way to combat hate speech in general and in times of crisis. Fourth, platform accountability is essential: the EU’s approach of requiring timely removal of illegal content under threat of penalties offers a model that balances free expression with protection from harm. Fifth, selective enforcement undermines trust: when some offenders walk free while others are prosecuted, minority communities lose faith in the state’s commitment to equality before the law.

So, what should be done in Sri Lanka? First, the state must enforce the laws it already has. Incitement to hatred and violence is a crime, and it should be prosecuted, whoever the offender is, whether a monk, a politician or an anonymous account. Selective enforcement, in which some offenders walk free, is the greatest source of the Muslim community’s mistrust. Second, the government should press large technology companies to hire Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking moderators, respond faster to reports of incitement, and publish how many such reports they act on. Third, journalists and media bodies should adopt clear rules on sponsored travel and disclosure and hold themselves to them. Finally, civil society, including Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu and Muslim leaders, must keep speaking together. The most powerful answer to collective blame is visible collective solidarity.

Sri Lanka has paid dearly for the politics of hatred, in war, in riots and in the shadow of Easter. The experiences of Myanmar, India, Europe and the United States show that the costs of inaction are measured not only in violence and displacement, but in the erosion of social trust, the weakening of democratic institutions, and the long-term marginalisation of entire communities. A government elected on hope now has the chance to show that this history need not repeat. The question is whether Sri Lanka will learn from others’ failures or become another cautionary tale for the region.