Should WhatsApp be held accountable for lynchings?

PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU ON JULY 20, 2018

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 | JAIJIT BHATTACHARYA

The government must educate the public and law enforcement agencies should do their job

We have come to witness the destructive power of social media. The obvious question is, who is responsible for these lynchings? The easiest thing to do is to find the most obvious entity in this chain of malicious videos being spread, and blame that entity. In this case, the entity is WhatsApp.

There is no doubt that mobile messaging platforms are in a powerful position to make significant interventions to prevent mob attacks that are arising out of what they themselves are facilitating. However, messaging platforms are only one actor in the chain of malafide content that is being spread.

Understanding the chain

The chain of malafide content being spread includes people who are creating such content (and are clearly investing significant time and perhaps money in doing this), mobile messaging platforms, people who are forwarding such content, people who are organising the mobs, and authorities who are responsible for maintaining law and order.

Let us look at the chain of spreading malafide content. First, there is a content creator. This is not the first time that mob frenzy has been triggered in India through a mobile messaging platform. A prominent case was in August 2012 when there was mass exodus of northeastern people from Bengaluru. Why did we have such a social media-led panic in Bengaluru? If an adversary is quickly learning how to spread hate from a city to the entire country, as is the case now, it is only a matter of time before the adversary’s next attack is on institutions. That would have a far greater destructive impact on the country. So, would it help if we only forced one mobile messaging platform to take steps to stop the spread of malicious videos? Yes, it may help for now, but the forces that seem to be getting better at social media-led attacks will use an alternative platform, just as they started with MMS for the mass exodus from Bengaluru and then moved to mobile messaging.

We must also keep in mind that India is perhaps the only place in the world where mobile messaging has led to such a widespread mass exodus and lynchings.Vested interests

Why hasn’t the same happened in other countries? Clearly, one of the reasons is that such behaviour is being engineered by powers with vested interests that are detrimental to India. But there is also the fact that we have some uneducated, underexposed and gullible citizens who are living in a society with deep fissures and mistrust. We also have highly educated people — doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. — who fail to understand the power of technology in creating chaos and who find it hard to differentiate truth from fiction.

It is necessary for the government to urgently educate the public. Similarly, enforcement agencies need to develop standard operating protocols to tackle such situations. Such a step needs to be reinforced by appropriate regulatory changes that make it mandatory for entities in the chain of information dissemination to share appropriate alerts with the law enforcement authorities, in a real-time electronic format.

In the absence of such a regulation, information intermediaries can neither be triggered to act, nor be held illegal for any acts of omission on their part.

Jaijit Bhattacharya is president, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research