After Sri Lanka's President Anura Kumara Dissanayake held a press conference in March 2026 on the country's energy shortage caused by the Middle East war, an old video circulated in social media posts falsely claiming it showed his party's secretary Tilvin Silva criticising his response to the crisis. The clip is from 2020 and shows Silva slamming Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president at the time, over his government's Covid response.

"Anura is a lunatic -- Tilvin Silva," reads a Sinhala-language Facebook post shared on March 18.

The attached video shows the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna's (JVP) party secretary Tilvin Silva saying, "We saw the president addressing the nation last night. We were told he would speak at eight, but he couldn't even manage to address us until around 8:45." (archived here and here)

Text overlaid on the video reads: "Anura's address to the nation is irresponsible."

The posts spread a day after Dissanayake held a special press conference where he said Sri Lanka was unable to secure two shipments of 90,000 tonnes of crude oil due to the Middle East war, but was in talks with "friendly states" including neighbouring India and Russia to purchase refined products (archived here and here).

Faced with an energy crisis, Sri Lanka has begun rationing fuel and imposed a four-day working week in a bid to conserve fuel.

Dissanayake has also urged electric vehicle owners to stop charging their cars at night and take advantage of the abundant electricity generated from solar power during the day instead, as the surge in demand forces the country to burn more coal and diesel to keep the power grid running.

Similar claims were shared elsewhere on Facebook, but the video is actually from 2020 -- before the JVP-led coalition came into power -- and it shows Silva criticising former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa's response to the Covid pandemic at the time.

A reverse image search on Google found a video of a JVP press conference uploaded to the party's YouTube channel on March 18, 2020, where he can be heard making the same remarks at the 3:56 mark (archived link).

He said the party was ready to contribute to Sri Lanka's Covid response and criticised measures taken by Rajapaksa's government. He did not mention Dissanayake in the video.

His remarks about the president being late for his speech appear to refer to Rajapaksa's address to the nation delivered on the previous day -- which was expected at 8:00 pm local time (1430 GMT) but was pushed back (archived link).

AFP has debunked other misinformation stemming from the war in the Middle East.