Last week, WhatsApp claimed more lives as forwards spread rumours and fake news. Police in India’s north-eastern Assam state have arrested 16 people after two tourists were allegedly lynched, after rumours they were child kidnappers circulated on social media.
Rumours of children being kidnapped and killed, supposedly for their body parts, over Facebook and WhatsApp have recently gathered momentum across India. The result has been at least six people killed by vigilante mobs in the past few weeks.
In some instances, doctored video messages, depicting children being snatched from streets had been circulated, resulting in local mobs beating up and killing anyone who looked unfamiliar or could not speak the local language or dialect.
While the role of technology and digital penetration into the Indian hinterland is to help people acquire information and get their correct dues, whether it is the right price for the local produce or citizen grievance redressal, sometimes the same technology can be dangerous and fatal.
In 2013, messages sent on WhatsApp helped to incite riots in Muzaffarnagar. Even the fake news of a salt shortage in north India spread rapidly last year.
Fake news and forwarding rumours can be a dangerous business. After the recent crackdown on fake account holders on Facebook, such users are now quietly moving onto Whatsapp. The messaging application now becomes the go-to destination for those spreading fake news and rumours.
Facebook has shut down 583 million fake accounts in the last three months and moderated 2.5 million posts of hate speech, it is difficult to do policing on WhatsApp because every content on the platform is encrypted and one cannot know about the source of origin of a message or the number of times it was shared.
WhatsApp may need to come up with solutions like flagging messages as forwards so that people can decide whether they should believe them or not. But it definitely needs some kind of policing to ensure that rumours do not spread like wild fire through WhatsApp.
And more than technological solutions, it requires every individual to use their moral compass to ensure that rumours do not translate to insane violence.
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