Sri Lankan here.

Historically, the people here have engaged in "knee-jerk" violence following an initial inflammatory incident; see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_July

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_anti-Muslim_riots_in_Sri_...

In the second incident listed above, social media was used both as a vector to spread hate speech and misinformation, and also to help mobs organize.

Regarding the current social media block: at the start, I felt this to be reasonable, as it made sense to slow the spread of misinformation/hate speech for a couple of days, until people's emotions cool down. However, the blocks still continue - and I see no clear justification for continuing them for so long.

Update: social media isn't blocked anymore. Six days in total - reasonable enough, I think.

Any form of limiting speech is an attack on the principles of a healthy nation. State-wide censorship is never reasonable.

"I felt this to be reasonable" haha ....

I'm guessing this is just an attempt to make the social media blocks more effective. And I suppose the purpose of blocking social media is to suppress public discussion and criticism, which is intended to prevent social unrest like protesting, riots or a sudden change in government? I'm not too sure; it's hard to understand from within a society where it's considered a fundamental right to criticise the government.

Sometimes people just don't like each other, due to prejudice, differences in religion, some old beef between clans / ethnic groups / regional groups. This may have no relation to the government being oppressive or liberal.

Shutting down communication channels rarely helps defuse such situations, though. It leads to more isolation, more rumors, more enmity.

Legitimately curious response: have you tried thinking through the answer to this question, and if so, what seems like the likely answer in your view? If not, why not?

So I'm not sure what question you're asking if someone has put thought into, but assuming it was "What do they hope to achieve by this?"

shakes Magic 8 ball

My guess is it's a combination of what the Sri Lankan poster above mentioned combined with a reaction to further technical escalation by the citizenry.

Unfortunately, there are too many unknowns w.r.t. Sri Lanka's government/cultural values for me to even hazard a guess as to what the endgame is beyond minimizing net driven attempts to organize.

What I do see potentially transpiring, however, is someone figuring out how to host basic net based communication within the country; odds are though, the government feel themselves sufficiently equipped to take down in country rabble rousing, and possibly aim to keep outside influences from inflaming things further.

Best thing you can do if you want to get out, is find the IP addresses for your particular of site, and use that. DNS based blocking does squat if you're maintaining your own registry of IP->Domain Name bindings. If they catch on and start trying to IP block, well, welcome back to the pre/early internet days. Hopefully you know someone willing to host you a forwarding proxy.

Stay safe Sri Lanka folks.

HN discussion really is useless these days.

There were recently terror attacks in the country... That the police warned about. So they knew and yet the attacks happened. So diddly shit.