WhatsApp Hoax Causes Yet Another Mob Lynching Incident in India

Whatsapp Fake News Leads to 22 Deaths in India in One Year

Every bit a outcome of Jio'due south entry in India, the internet has reached a much wider demographic than before. With this, many Indians have come up to utilise apps like Facebook, and WhatsApp for the first time and even enjoy it. But on the darker side, this piece of cake admission to the internet has also resulted in the propagation of hoaxes and misleading information.

Lately, WhatsApp in India is plagued with the blatant messaging forward out of which almost half of the news is fake. Merely, the alarming part is that this ignorance has led to violence. Phony messages about "child lifters" or kidnappers accept been making rounds on WhatsApp and in the concluding xiii months, this has resulted in irrational and absurd brutality by lynch mobs leading to at least 22 reported deaths.

Only a fortnight after ii young men were browbeaten to death in Assam over suspicion of being child abductors, some other incident from Madhya Pradesh comes to low-cal. Mobilized by a WhatsApp message nigh kidnappers who would traffic and murder humans for their vital organs, a mob of more 50 people beat out upwards two innocent men, purely on the footing of suspicion.

The news which spread like a wildfire across several states, claims that 400 kid traffickers have arrived in major cities of South India. It urges parents to keep their children prophylactic and these parents, motivated to protect their kids, end up taking lives of strangers with a different appearance than theirs. And then, intrinsically, this is killing on the basis of looks, and it is appalling to see Republic of india's new favorite way of discriminating racially.

These abhorrent lynchers are not criminals by profession, but simply agitated citizens seeking safety. In the recent case from Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh, the constabulary has identified and arrested three instigators. Many constabulary officers have taken the issue seriously and have joined local groups to crush efforts of spreading such news.

Rema Rajeshwari, an IPS officer of 2009 batch, has initiated a campaign against the detest-mongers. Simply instead of taking a roughshod stance against the general public, the officer is urging them to not believe anything and everything they read on WhatsApp – although that challenges a chronic aspect of the Indian psyche i.eastward. seeking flecks of evidence in annihilation written. Rajeshwari has engaged local musicians and other community influencers to spread her bulletin peacefully.

The tension appears to be rising with the latest i beingness the 9th instance in the past 31 days, with cases of violence from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal besides the ones mentioned previously. Only aside from social unrest, some of these tragic incidents also announced to be politically and religiously motivated. And with the national elections coming up next twelvemonth, such bug could continue at a startling step if non taken very seriously.

WhatsApp is supposed to be an encrypted platform, and expecting it to help alleviate the issue is not likely to accept fruitful results. It recently added a label to clearly demark "forwarded" letters simply that is not probable to curb the underlying causes. The solution lies in sensitizing citizens about the perils of fake news and teaching them how to spot misleading information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?five=givK7QhYKws

Alas, Bharat is no alien to violence, frenzied mobs, cultural and communal division, and fifty-fifty the fear of kid trafficking, which is a grave issue in the country. Each year, more than 100,000 children get abducted in India for begging and sex merchandise. So, a function of the solution lies in assuring parents about the rubber of their kids – though for this we are at the grace of our non-so-efficient politicians and police force enforcement authorities.

You can contribute your bit by sharing news more than responsibly on not merely WhatsApp and other platforms, and by talking to others virtually the dangers of playing with this double-edged sword.