India’s lynching app: who is using WhatsApp as a murder weapon?
Social media disseminates ‘fake news’, stoking ethnic and religious hatred for an ill-informed public
When the mobile telephone revolution swept India – a country where landline phones used to be hard to obtain – there were whoops of joys. Mobile telephony, said the experts, would transform India.
And it has indeed. At present there are 730 million mobile phone users in India. Of this, at least 340 million have smartphones with internet and video. The growth of mobile phones has outstripped nearly everything else. A 2016 study found that 88 per cent of all of India’s households had mobile phones. In contrast, about 60 per cent of all households have access to basic sanitation. (The government’s figure – much disputed – is slightly higher at 65 per cent.) And only around 64 per cent of all households own a TV set.
The smartphone revolution has changed the way Indians receive information. In 2014, the election campaign of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party focussed on social media with dramatic success. And now, WhatsApp is a primary source of information for millions of Indians – with worrying consequences.
The most dangerous of these consequences has been the rise in the lynching of innocent people because of fake news and rumours disseminated on WhatsApp. On July 6, the Indian army had to be called in to disperse a large mob that was trying to lynch three men in Mahur in India’s eastern state of Assam. Police had to rescue three others from a nearby village. The lynch mobs were incensed by false news carried on WhatsApp about childlifters.
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In June, two men were beaten to death in another Assam town after similar rumours spread on social media.
