Watchdog was founded on 23 April 2019, two days after the
Easter bombings occurred, by local startup mogul Bhanuka Harischandra, together with
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Nisal Periyapperuma, Ragulan Ketheeswaran and Safra Anver. Within 36 hours, the team had created a
fact-checking app. As the amount of misinformation was increasing significantly, Watchdog increased the scale of its operations, with Ketheeswaran recruiting volunteers to translate fact-checks to
Sinhala and
Tamil. Within 90 days, 25 to 30 volunteers were working for the group. At the time, the website and app had almost 52,000 users. In April of that year, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, Wijeratne and Periyapperuma, by then the only two remaining members, took a
sabbatical from operating Watchdog. and the
Daily Mirror newspaper used its data to counter then-
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa's claims that the unrest was reflective of a minority opinion. == See also ==