This article is about Tilen Pannala an influencer who has over 300,000 followers in social media and who generated millions in views is now being cornered with a court case in Belgium. Being honest and being Sri Lankan is his sole setback. Hence the outburst on behalf of all Sri Lankans who are rallying to protect him and his social media presence.
TRUTH. VOICE. COURAGE.
Progress has never been comfortable.
Every system that survives on silence fears the person who speaks plainly. Not because they are perfect — but because they refuse to pretend.
Tilen Pannala is not a manufactured personality. He is not a brand seeking approval. He is a human being who spoke in real time, with real emotions, during a personal collapse. He did not script pain. He did not outsource honesty. He went live — and said what he felt.
That alone changed everything.
He questioned how power is sometimes protected by rituals, how faith can be misused, and how people are manipulated under the cover of holiness. He did not do it with polish. He did it with urgency. And many people listened — because truth, unfiltered, travels fast
When his personal relationship broke down, he did not hide. He spoke openly, sometimes angrily, sometimes unwisely — but always as himself. In the age of algorithms and image management, that kind of raw honesty is rare. It is also dangerous.
Because systems don’t fear lies.
They fear uncontrolled truth
As his audience grew, so did resistance. According to supporters, what followed was not debate but pressure. Not disagreement but targeting. Anonymous narratives, personal attacks, stigma, and attempts to turn society against him using fear and shame.
Among the most disturbing actions described by those around him are attempts by the other party to spread false HIV reports on TikTok Live* in an effort to defame and discredit him*. Using misinformation about someone’s health to attack their reputation is not morality. It is not justice. It is a deliberate strategy to harm, intimidate, and erase a person’s voice.
Tilen has never hidden who he is. He has spoken openly about his identity in a society where many still cannot. That honesty didn’t weaken his voice — it made it harder to control.
This is where first-principles thinking matters.
- Being emotional is not a crime.
- Speaking loudly is not violence.
- Questioning authority is not hatred.
- Reacting imperfectly under stress does not cancel a lifetime of truth-telling.
The legal case itself is limited in scope. But the environment surrounding it reveals something larger: how easily personal conflict, amplified by social media, can be turned into a campaign to silence a public voice. How quickly anger can be reframed as intent. How fast a human can be reduced to a headline.
Yet even now, the response from Sri Lanka and from Tilen’s supporters worldwide has not been chaos. It has been patience.
They are waiting.
They are watching.
And they are placing their faith in the Belgian legal system to do what strong institutions are meant to do — see clearly.
They believe the law will separate noise from facts, emotion from intention, and allegations from evidence. Not because systems are perfect — but because truth still matters when due process is respected
History is full of people who were inconvenient before they were understood.
The question is not whether Tilen made mistakes. He has never claimed otherwise. The real question is this:
Do we build societies where only the calm and calculated are allowed to speak — or ones where imperfect humans are still granted dignity?