The Forward Curse

When Bollywood’s veteran actress Sridevi died , there were a lot of grieving messages being shared, also WhatsApp forwards and other shared materials of her achievements were circulated ; My mother somehow received the video of her funeral , a day before it was actually performed!

No matter how bizarre as well as hilarious that sounds , it portrays how misleading information exists among us , and now through WhatsApp and other social platforms , they have gained a lightening speed and a such scale that they are now becoming more widespread than they were before.

A new low was reached when lives were taken in various parts of the country , in lieu of such shares and messages . One such event which created an uproar was – when a sound engineer and a business man were on their way to a picnic spot in Assam  when they stopped at a village to ask for directions. The villagers had seen , a video circulating on the messaging app WhatsApp, that child kidnappers were roaming the country. Unfortunately , believing that these strangers were the ones they’d been hearing about, the villagers formed a large mob, and, before the men could explain them otherwise, they were beaten to death.The video they had seen was , an instructional safety video made in Pakistan. Since it was shared with some false text warning about kidnappers in the local area, consequently it caused fear and anger in the community. This along with various such incidents in many pockets of India , became the reckoning about the seriousness of these fake forwards.

India is one of the largest markets of Whatsapp and with easy access of 4G network , Internet has landed into the hands of many first time users . It not only acts as a messaging platform but also a news bearer (According to Reuters Research such platforms are news sources of large populations of Asia and Latin America) and the receivers tend to believe it without authenticating its source or relevancy ; Groups have membership upto 256 members hence making it difficult for authorities to track the rumour’s origin and extent of spread . Unlike , Twitter and Facebook , Whatsapp comes with end to end encryption , which bars the company to regulate the content transmitted .

IS WHATSAPP THE SOLE REASON ?

The answer is NO!

Yes , Whatsapp has regulated certain aspects , in its recent updates but certainly there is a lot to achieve in this direction apart from this knee jerk reaction from the messaging company, when threatened by the Indian Ministry against being a mere bystander. There is a need for a  proper infrastructure , guidelines and protocols to be followed in case of mass lynching and such vigilante group actions.

Currently, there is no record of past and present lynching incidents which makes it difficult to analyse the reasons and trends in such activities , resulting in no affirmative conclusions. Paul Brass , an academician , who has studied such riots in India , says that certain incidents have been a way of one community to exert their dominance over other communities . This is evidently seen in many such occurrences around the country where usually a minority or tribal or disabled person becomes victims of such treachery. Consequently facilitation of records in such cases and their cause of incitation over the years can help in painting a brighter picture of this newly discovered problem of mob and lynching caused due to mis-information.

Such incidents are usually spontaneous and mob gets concentrated in a very short span of time ; Without the knowledge of the trigger, the police is ill equipped , and lack of guidelines makes such situation hard to tackle . In order to create homogenised straight (less complex) public narrative , the blame fingers  are pointed towards Whatsapp .

These situations acts as an indicator of several structural faults existing which were concealed otherwise .

Nandagopal Rajan Of Indian Express says,  “Whatsapp is making an effort to understand [how people use its platform in India] but we are in an unchartered territory. Nobody has ever fathomed what happens when this kind of a platform, which is in encrypted code , starts working at a scale – the kind of scale you have in India.”

Government should take stringent measures , create a law , fulfil the deficit in the police reforms and create better intelligence services and lobby better features from such tech-giants. Maybe take a step further to create, a compiled data and curate it for proper correlation with circumstances and public sentiment , but this is where its purview ends (more-or-less) because the important aspect is not only law creation but effective implementation whose onus , also lies on us. This problem of spam and fake news entails our daily lives and such situations can not be the part of daily lives . The movement should come from us – the citizens . Unless we start questioning the information that is given to us , this problem is here to stay!