Paper short abstract:

By hacking big data from the bottom up, this paper examines how Sri Lanka social media activists interpret data visualizations of their interactivity on Twitter around the use of specific hashtags linked to the 2022 Aragalaya protests

Paper long abstract:

What is the relationship between big data & democracy, and how does the opaque phenomenon of Twitter data reflect the volatility of Sri Lankan politics? Following Hannah Knox’s call to conceptualize data as a thing to be “hacked” (Knox, 2021), this paper proposes a decolonial intervention by examining how highly active Sri Lankan social media users interpret data visualizations of their interactivity on Twitter around the use of specific hashtags linked to the 2022 Aragalaya protests (Aragalaya meaning “the struggle” in local language, Sinhala).

Transforming representation from a mode of description into a site of action, these visualizations, derived from data extracted via the Twitter API, reveal a digital landscape heavily influenced by bots and other nefarious agents, raising questions about the viability of Twitter as a platform for digital democracy. While big data carries an epistemological “aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (boyd & Crawford, 2012), the Sri Lankan social media users’ engagement demonstrates the prevalence of alternative “data realities” (Knox, 2021). For some, the visualizations reveal truth and evidence about what really happened; for others, they signify machinations of surveillance and violence.