China's social media influence operations in Sri Lanka

In January 2021, I delivered a recorded presentation for Centre for Social and Economic Progress seminar on China's social media signatures in Sri Lanka, in a session with Head of Program, Information Operations and Disinformation at Australian Strategic Policy Institute , Jake Wallis. Discovered today the meeting's topline report.

Comments made in my video presentation (embedded below) preface chapter I ended up writing at the invitation of CSEP's Constantino Xavier , and part of How China Engages South Asia: Themes, Partners and Tools. China's social media accounts on Meta's product, and platform surfaces, as well as Twitter, continue to churn out content at pace. Since content on Facebook is exclusively in Sinhala, though public, it remains inaccessible to Western scholarship, and strategic assessments of how, and what issues are covered (in addition to silences, and erasures).

The chapter - Patterns and Trends in Chinese Propaganda on Facebook in Sri Lanka - was the 1st ever grounded research in South Asia studying China's influence operations (IO) on social media.

Uploaded video of my presentation to YouTube, which now complements the CSEP report's chapter.

Something I want to do in the coming months is to study evolution in the post-aragalaya Sri Lanka (i.e., China's IO in the country after the historic, and unprecedented sociopolitical movement, and moment in 2022).

The CSEP chapter was edited to focus only on Facebook, but detailed dive on Twitter signatures, that chapter draft built on, goes back to 2020's capture of Chinese Embassy Twitter account, including how it bizarrely targeted me, & subsequent captures over successive years. These links resolve to PDFs created from tweet threads of mine.