| dc.description.abstract | Prolonged riots which violates legal rights and peaceful limits and turns violent with
having a potential toward to an anarchical social unrest are perceived as threats to
national security, exacerbated in the digital age by the impact of online news and social
media. Activists use platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram for riot organization
without traditional structures. This presents challenges for national security stakeholders,
necessitating agile responses to the rapidly evolving online landscape. Open-source
intelligence (OSINT) is valuable in understanding social media’s role in riots. This
paper presents a case study of Sri Lanka’s 2022 riots, examining social media’s role
in propaganda, organizing and mobilizing. For that, temporal data on hashtags, online
groups member growth, call-for-action posts, and YouTube Live streams were collected
for analyses. Online news volume related to the riots was also analyzed using the Global
Database for Events Language and Tone (GDELT) to assess riot intensity through media
coverage. Based on these insights and analysis, an operational framework is recommended
for responding to the use of online news and social media in riots, incorporating elements
from the OODA loop and other existing models and frameworks. This framework
emphasizes the importance of proactive analysis of online and social media activity related
to riots, as well as the need for rapid and e ective responses to emerging threats. This
research explores the impact of social media on riots using Sri Lanka’s 2022 unrest as
a case study. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on the use of
online news and social media in riots and highlights the critical role of OSINT techniques
in understanding and responding to emerging threats | en_US |
