![The coordinated Easter bombings that ripped through Sri Lankan churches and luxury hotels were carried out by suicide bombers which killed and injured hundreds of people [Chamila Karunarathne/AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/4/22/f32164e628104e8cb45c0ce56fb5649c_18.jpg)
Hours after the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, rumours started to circulate online that Colombo’s water supply was poisoned and that there was a truck full of explosives driving down the capital’s traffic-lined Galle Road.
This caused panic. But Yudhanjana Wijeratne, a data scientist for public policy at Colombo-based think-tank LIRNEasia, got to work debunking.
Along with a few friends, Wijeratne began fact-checking rumours submitted to them by verifying the information with calls to police, journalists or people they knew living in the areas where the stories originated.
“We got drawn into what I would describe as low-level information warfare,” he said.
In the weeks after the attacks, carried out by a small group of fighters pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), there were Facebook posts calling on Buddhists to boycott Muslim shops and restaurants, even going so far as threatening to kill them.
These social media posts in the online world led to violence against Sri Lanka‘s Muslim community.
Facebook’s response was that several of these posts didn’t violate its community standards.
Sri Lanka’s social media watchdog group Groundviews cited six million people using social media – out of a population of 21 million.
Global News 
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