Seldom has the Indian public been so exercised by the politics of hate and fear as at present, with online rumour-mongering and fake news igniting vigilantism and witch-hunts in different parts of the country.
Much of this churning is taking place through the social media where internet trolls, spammers and troublemakers are reigning supreme, sowing incendiary posts to online communities with the intention to provoke and intimidate.
Rumours circulating on WhatsApp about kidnappers marauding for children have been causing widespread panic, with frenzied mobs attacking those they deem suspects, leading to at least 18 unwary men and women being lynched in the streets in just over the last one month alone. Often, the victims are charged with involvement in selling children to adoption centres or to agents for organ harvesting.
Alarmed by this trend, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has petitioned WhatsApp to do what it can to check rumour-mongering and hoax messages on its platform. The Facebook-owned instant messaging service has agreed to devise means for preventing the spread of such posts in the country. But to do this would require monitoring and sanitising, and it is unclear how that could happen when the social networking site claims it does not store messages on its servers once they are delivered, and that end-to-end encryption prevents third parties and WhatsApp itself from reading them.
The provocative rumours are at times illustrated with videos of someone who happens to be walking behind a child, or is talking to or is looking in the direction of one. The accompanying comments counselling vigil and caution against these so-called child-lifters have been enough to breed public hysteria about the safety of children…Click here to read full article.
