AWhatsApp text circulating in some districts of India’s central Madhya Pradesh state helped to inflame a mob of 50-60 villagers into savagely beating up two innocent men last week on suspicion that they were going to murder people and sell their body parts.
The essence of the message, written in Hindi, was that 500 people disguised as beggars were roaming the area so that they could kill people to harvest their organs. Police say the message was fake.
Police officers who joined several local WhatsApp groups, found three men circulating the message and they were arrested, said Jayadevan A, the police chief for Balaghat district, where the incident occurred.
This happened just weeks after a WhatsApp text warning of 400 child traffickers arriving in the southern Indian technology hub of Bengaluru led a frenzied mob to lynch a 26-year-old man, a migrant construction worker from another Indian state, on suspicions that he was a kidnapper. He was attacked while he was just walking on the road.
So far this year, false messages about child abductors on Facebook Inc-owned WhatsApp have triggered mass beatings of more than a dozen people in India — at least three of whom have died.
In addition, fake messages about child snatchers on Facebook, as well as some texts on WhatsApp, also led to the lynching of two men in eastern India earlier this month.
With more than 200 million users in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market in the world, false news and videos circulating on the messaging app have become a new headache for social media giant Facebook.
In India, a country with over a billion phone subscribers with access to cheap mobile data, false news messages and videos can instantly go viral, creating mass hysteria and stirring up communal tensions.
WhatsApp said it is aware of the incidents in India through media coverage.
“Sadly some people also use WhatsApp to spread harmful misinformation,” WhatsApp said in a statement.
“We’re stepping up our education efforts so that people know about our safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.”
Group texts, where fake news spreads most easily, are still a minority: 90 per cent of messages are between two people, and the average group size is six people, according to the messaging platform.
WhatsApp also said it is considering changes to the service. For example, there is now a public beta test that is labelling any forwarded message.
Two senior Indian government officials said that New Delhi had engaged with WhatsApp on the issue but they are not allowed to discuss the matter publicly. WhatsApp declined to comment on possible contact with Indian government officials.
A deluge of hoax news incidents, several with fatal consequences, may bolster the Indian government’s attempts to get social networks to share more user data so that police can track down those spreading rumours. That concerns privacy advocates who fear the authorities will use such access against activists and political opponents, and not just against those spreading malicious information.
“Government restrictions on dissemination of false news are too often an attempt to shroud government intentions of restricting freedom of expression and criticism,” according to David Kaye, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.
India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has also recently floated a tender for a firm to scrutinise social media posts of Indian users and identify fake news.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is working on a data protection law that could force all foreign tech firms to store key Indian user data locally.— Reuters
Sankalp Phartiyal, Subrat Patnaik and David Ingram
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