COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AFP) – President Mahinda Rajapaksa has declared a state of emergency in SriSri Lanka and tried to stop the protests from spiraling out of control by banning major social media platforms. This led to an unprecedented rise in the use of censorship-defying virtual private networks, a monitoring company said Monday.
There was a huge surge in demand for VPNs on Sunday, according to a site called Top10VPN.com, which looked at Sri Lankan users downloading them.
In an email, the firm’s director of research, Simon Migliano, told AFP that there were 27,815 VPN searches “compared to an average of 321 daily over the preceding 28 days.”
“This is a big rise in the number of people who want to learn more about what is usually a very specialized instrument.”
Sunday’s ban cut off access to popular services like WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, and a lot more. It was overturned 15 hours later when the country’s Human Rights Council said the ban was unconstitutional.
The country’s internet regulator resigned after the ban was put into place, and the president’s nephew, Namal Rajapaksa, also openly criticized the measure, which he said was unfair.
“With the availability of VPNs, such as the one I’m using right now, such prohibitions are rendered utterly ineffective,” Rajapaksa said on Twitter.
“I implore the authorities to use more discernment and rethink this choice.”
He resigned that evening, along with the rest of Sri Lanka’s 28-member government, with the exception of his uncle President and father, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Sri Lanka is engulfed in what the administration admits is the island nation’s greatest economic crisis since 1948, when it gained independence from Britain.
The anti-government hashtags “#GoHomeRajapaksas” and “#GotaGoHome” have been trending locally on social media for days after catastrophic shortages of basic necessities, steep price increases, and debilitating power outages.
