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26-11-2023, 10:15 AM
A crowd had gathered at a village temple in Kesapuri, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when Vikas Patil plugged a hard drive into his laptop to begin his show.
First, he showed them an explicit video of a cow being killed. The animals are considered sacred to “upper caste” Hindus. In India, the slaughter of cattle for meat is largely the preserve of Muslims, a fact that wasn’t lost on the viewers. As people settled in to watch, Patil then played a couple of videos about “love jihad,” a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are systematically wooing Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam. To finish off the session, Patil showed a handful of clips detailing the supposed “bigotry” of Islam.
It was 2012, and most of India’s rural communities were not yet connected to the internet. Penetration was only 12 percent,
......
Misinformation, conspiracy, and hate speech are often perceived as a phenomenon of the social media age, but even before India came online en masse, enterprising groups like Sanatan Sanstha were working at the grassroots level to seed ethnically charged narratives, traveling from village to village with hard drives loaded with propaganda. Since then, the channels available to them have changed profoundly. Today more than half the population of India—759 million people—are online. The country has 467 million active YouTube users—the most in the world. The users are no longer predominantly urban. Nobody has tapped into this proliferation better than right-wing groups dedicated to fostering communal disharmony, moving from hard disks filled with videos and laptops in temples to the vast reach of YouTube and WhatsApp.
......
Sitting in that crowd in Kesapuri, watching Patil’s videos, was Sharad Kalasar, a 19-year old college dropout who cultivated his father’s 7-acre farm in the village. A year and a half later, he allegedly murdered one of the foremost secularists in India.
......
the growth of WhatsApp and the proliferation of smartphones was also a boon for people looking to spread misinformation, who realized that they could bypass the institutions of mass communication and create a parallel information space. “The right-wingers very intelligently adopted digital media as mass media,” he said. “They tapped into the masses that weren’t exposed to any kind of media at all.”
Fake news, misleading pictures, and hate videos circulated via social media have been influential in shaping public opinion and have cost lives. In September 2015, photos were circulated via WhatsApp across the small town of Dadri in Western Uttar Pradesh, alleging that a Muslim man had slaughtered a cow. The man was lynched.
In April 2020, messages went viral in the district of Palghar in Maharashtra—weeks after Covid-19 broke out in India—claiming that “500 Muslims with coronavirus” had been “let loose” to roam the country in disguise, targeting other religious groups and stealing children. Petrified locals started guarding their villages at night. On 16 April, two Hindu seers were lynched after a mob stopped their car and mistook them for Muslims.
On March 31 of this year, the northern state of Bihar was rocked by violence ahead of Ram Navami, a Hindu festival marking the birth of mythological figure Lord Ram. One person died in the clashes and several others were injured. The police later declared that the violence was planned by a leader of the Bajrang Dal, a far-right radical organization close to the ruling BJP, over a WhatsApp group that had 456 members. “In the WhatsApp group, a conspiracy was plotted to spread violence, and fake and misleading posts targeting one community were shared,” the police told reporters, saying that the group was also being used to instigate people to spread fake videos targeting Muslims.
......
Backers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has pursued Hindu nationalist policies, are among those who have used YouTube to broadcast anti-Muslim content. First Draft News, a nonprofit that counters hate speech and misinformation, has identified several Islamophobic channels on YouTube, all with over a million subscribers.
......
Sectarian content on social media has proliferated because the laws against hate speech have been used selectively by those in power. While the Modi government was quick to force social media platforms to block clips of a controversial BBC documentary about Modi’s alleged involvement in intercommunal violence in 2002, there has been a proliferation of channels that broadcast extreme nationalist rhetoric because, human rights groups say, the polarization suits the BJP, which runs on a majoritarian, Hindu nationalist platform.
......
One of the more alarming facets of this cycle, the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s Manzar says, is that the mainstream media is now beginning to mirror narratives seen on social media. “The mainstream media has begun producing content based on what is selling on social media,” he says. “That is how the entire pro-establishment and anti-Muslim media has come up. When ‘a dog bites the man’ makes news, the news starts to make the dog bite the man. Earlier, there used to be news publication. With the proliferation of social media, there is news creation.”
......
Much better to read the FULL article at: https://www.wired.com/story/india-electi...ital-hate/
First, he showed them an explicit video of a cow being killed. The animals are considered sacred to “upper caste” Hindus. In India, the slaughter of cattle for meat is largely the preserve of Muslims, a fact that wasn’t lost on the viewers. As people settled in to watch, Patil then played a couple of videos about “love jihad,” a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are systematically wooing Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam. To finish off the session, Patil showed a handful of clips detailing the supposed “bigotry” of Islam.
It was 2012, and most of India’s rural communities were not yet connected to the internet. Penetration was only 12 percent,
......
Misinformation, conspiracy, and hate speech are often perceived as a phenomenon of the social media age, but even before India came online en masse, enterprising groups like Sanatan Sanstha were working at the grassroots level to seed ethnically charged narratives, traveling from village to village with hard drives loaded with propaganda. Since then, the channels available to them have changed profoundly. Today more than half the population of India—759 million people—are online. The country has 467 million active YouTube users—the most in the world. The users are no longer predominantly urban. Nobody has tapped into this proliferation better than right-wing groups dedicated to fostering communal disharmony, moving from hard disks filled with videos and laptops in temples to the vast reach of YouTube and WhatsApp.
......
Sitting in that crowd in Kesapuri, watching Patil’s videos, was Sharad Kalasar, a 19-year old college dropout who cultivated his father’s 7-acre farm in the village. A year and a half later, he allegedly murdered one of the foremost secularists in India.
......
the growth of WhatsApp and the proliferation of smartphones was also a boon for people looking to spread misinformation, who realized that they could bypass the institutions of mass communication and create a parallel information space. “The right-wingers very intelligently adopted digital media as mass media,” he said. “They tapped into the masses that weren’t exposed to any kind of media at all.”
Fake news, misleading pictures, and hate videos circulated via social media have been influential in shaping public opinion and have cost lives. In September 2015, photos were circulated via WhatsApp across the small town of Dadri in Western Uttar Pradesh, alleging that a Muslim man had slaughtered a cow. The man was lynched.
In April 2020, messages went viral in the district of Palghar in Maharashtra—weeks after Covid-19 broke out in India—claiming that “500 Muslims with coronavirus” had been “let loose” to roam the country in disguise, targeting other religious groups and stealing children. Petrified locals started guarding their villages at night. On 16 April, two Hindu seers were lynched after a mob stopped their car and mistook them for Muslims.
On March 31 of this year, the northern state of Bihar was rocked by violence ahead of Ram Navami, a Hindu festival marking the birth of mythological figure Lord Ram. One person died in the clashes and several others were injured. The police later declared that the violence was planned by a leader of the Bajrang Dal, a far-right radical organization close to the ruling BJP, over a WhatsApp group that had 456 members. “In the WhatsApp group, a conspiracy was plotted to spread violence, and fake and misleading posts targeting one community were shared,” the police told reporters, saying that the group was also being used to instigate people to spread fake videos targeting Muslims.
......
Backers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has pursued Hindu nationalist policies, are among those who have used YouTube to broadcast anti-Muslim content. First Draft News, a nonprofit that counters hate speech and misinformation, has identified several Islamophobic channels on YouTube, all with over a million subscribers.
......
Sectarian content on social media has proliferated because the laws against hate speech have been used selectively by those in power. While the Modi government was quick to force social media platforms to block clips of a controversial BBC documentary about Modi’s alleged involvement in intercommunal violence in 2002, there has been a proliferation of channels that broadcast extreme nationalist rhetoric because, human rights groups say, the polarization suits the BJP, which runs on a majoritarian, Hindu nationalist platform.
......
One of the more alarming facets of this cycle, the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s Manzar says, is that the mainstream media is now beginning to mirror narratives seen on social media. “The mainstream media has begun producing content based on what is selling on social media,” he says. “That is how the entire pro-establishment and anti-Muslim media has come up. When ‘a dog bites the man’ makes news, the news starts to make the dog bite the man. Earlier, there used to be news publication. With the proliferation of social media, there is news creation.”
......
Much better to read the FULL article at: https://www.wired.com/story/india-electi...ital-hate/
