08 July 2022 12:42
On the evening of May 3 at Galle face green, a public park overlooking the sea in Colombo, the most important city in Sri Lanka, teenagers play plastic trumpets. Parents walk with children on their backs. Someone goes up on improvised podiums to address the crowd, greeted by applause. It seems to be at a party, instead it is one of the many protests that have flooded the country since March to demand the dismissal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and solutions to the most serious economic crisis of the last seventy years.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is there and observes. He points to the spot where protesters built an electrical grid by welding solar panels to an open truck and connecting them to a battery. With the energy obtained they are able to power more than twenty smartphones that emit their lights in a large blue tent, where a library with fifteen thousand books has been set up. “This is what the Sri Lankans produce if you let them do it: structures built from scratch, shit,” she tells Nilesh Christopher, the Rest of World reporter who is there with him. “The real wealth we should export is the contested degree,” he adds.
Wijeratne is 29 years old. He is tall, with tousled hair and a scraggly beard, writes Christopher. He learned to program on his own using a computer recovered from a landfill near a shop that sold second-hand PCs and phones. On his right arm he has a tattoo of a tree with Darth Vader’s helmet. “He loves to argue, constantly swears and quotes George Bernard Shaw phrases by heart. When he doesn’t speak, he smokes ”.
He is best known for writing Numbercaste, a science fiction novel set in the not too distant future in which everyone is associated with a score based on their acquaintances and activity on social networks. But for some months in Sri Lanka we have been talking about him also because he is one of the minds behind the Watchdog collective. The group made up of about ten people including computer scientists, journalists, economists, researchers and students has actually existed since 2019 as a fact-checking site and app, i.e. verifying news and their sources.
The collective started from open source data and from there localized and verified the videos on the demonstrations
It was born in response to a series of attacks that had traumatized the country and unleashed a mad hunt for Muslims: social media overflowed with content that accused them of wanting to contaminate the aqueduct, plan attacks and circulate a pill that made women sterile. To disprove these rumors, the collective had built an app in two days, combining a Google spreadsheet, thousands of messages released on WhatsApp and Facebook groups and a team of volunteers and journalists to contact to get help. When users accessed the app, they were faced with two news lists: the verified ones on one side and the fake ones on the other.
In recent months, however, Watchdog has attracted the attention of a growing number of Sri Lankans, and the authorities, for its Protest tracker: a map of protests. To build and update this map, the collective started from open source data, that is, freely accessible – public archives, posts on social networks, satellite images – and from there it located and verified the videos on the events that were published online.
In the first week, Watchdog checked and classified footage shot in 116 locations across the country, providing estimates of the size of each gathering and other information. Then, when the authorities moved to crack down on the protests, they began to collect and examine videos showing police violence, clashes and pro-government demonstrations.
Between March 30 and May 11, it confirmed 597 mobilizations and 49 clashes, offering the most complete online archive of protests. His map has been cited by local and international media as a reliable source. In April, it reached over a million users.
But the collective didn’t stop there. He also investigated the reasons that led people to take to the streets. For example, power outages: houses were continuously without light, even for thirteen hours straight. The government, however, insisted that these were isolated incidents, ensuring that the supply of electricity was constant. There was a huge gap between people’s everyday experience and the official story. So Watchdog asked users to indicate the location and duration of the blackouts; he crossed those data with public documents on the supply of electricity and the financial statements of the companies that provided the service. In the end, he proved that these state-owned companies hadn’t planned an offer to cover demand and were burdened with debt, so they didn’t have the money to buy the fuel to get light everywhere.
After the blackouts, the group turned to hospitals, which lacked drugs and equipment. To help them stock up, he came up with a simple form (also a Google sheet) on which doctors and facilities could indicate drugs that had run out or were about to run out. Then he created a public repository that functions as a demand forecasting system: it matches each request to a list of suppliers approved by the competent authorities. Once their question appeared in the archive, doctors just had to wait for donors or humanitarian organizations to take action to get them what they needed.
The problem is that the emergencies are endless: the current continues to blow, food is scarce. At the end of June, the state schools were closed and the staff in public offices was reduced to the bone to limit the circulation of cars, that is, fuel consumption. Many are hoping for a new Watchdog map, this time on petrol pumps.
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