WILL FREE EXPRESSION BECOME A CASUALTY OF 2020 DYSTOPIA?

No one could have imagined the dystopian extremes 2020 took us to. A 112-day lockdown in Victoria, Australia pales compared to what others have experienced in other parts of the world.

- Amantha Perera

Victoria came out of the lockdown in late October. In early October, Sri Lanka recorded a sudden, sharp spike in numbers when what is now referred to as the Brandix cluster came to light.

There appears to be no effective arrest in the surge in the past two and half months neither is it clear as to what triggered this wave.

We already see the powerful role that social media plays in all this. This is the reason why we are talking about controlling the Facebook posts of fake profiles desk warriors rather than talking of a competent authority for the media. The latter was the option a decade back. Not anymore

We enter 2021 with apprehensions and fraught nerves like never before. There is the fear of the pandemic, when will we feel safe, ever again? A question neither authoritarian administrations nor democratic ones have failed to answer. One has tried to deal with fears by mercilessly controlling the information while the other has tried to allay fears by way of being as transparent as the circumstances warrant.

Controlling information has become one of the key by-products of the pandemic. Even before the world came face to face with the true width and girth of the pandemic, WHO had already declared it an infodemic.