Five people were killed by a mob in India on Sunday after rumors spread on social media that they were child traffickers, the latest in a string of lynchings tied to fake social media messages that have left officials stunned and grappling with ways to control the rising violence.
More than a dozen people have been killed across India since May in the spate of violence fueled mainly by the WhatsApp messaging service. The violence has been sparked largely by villagers in rural areas – some of whom may be using smartphones for the first time. Inflamed by fake warnings of child trafficking rings or organ harvesters, they have attacked innocent bystanders and beaten them to death.
Governments around the world are considering laws and controls against fake news in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the rise of hate speech. Such reactions have raised free-speech concerns. But the spread of fake news, a global scourge, has been particularly pernicious in India, where legions of new, inexperienced smartphone users send billions of messages a day on WhatsApp, which has more than 200 million users in India, its largest market.
As India’s government weighs what to do, local authorities have been left to tackle fake news as best they can, issuing warnings and employing low-tech methods such as hiring street performers and “rumor busters” to visit villages to spread public awareness. One such “rumor buster” was killed by a mob Thursday in the eastern state of Tripura.
“We are trying to counter the misinformation by aggressive campaigning on social media, WhatsApp and local TV channels,” said M. Ramkumar, the superintendent of police in Dhule, a district in western India. It was there that five nomadic beggars were beaten to death Sunday by villagers who thought they were child kidnappers.
“We want to convey the message that all rumors are false and they should not fall prey to them,” Ramkumar said.
Meanwhile, Google announced last month it is expanding an existing program for journalists in India to help train 8,000 reporters in seven languages to spot and expose fake news generated in the country’s “specific misinformation ecosystem,” according to Irene Jay Liu, the head of Google News Lab for the Asia-Pacific region, Google’s largest such effort.
(c) 2018, The Washington Post · Annie Gowen
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“Governments around the world are considering laws and controls against fake news” Huh? The governments themselves are the ones bringing on fake news. CNN Fake News, NYT Fake News, WaPo Fake News, for instance, are all controlled by the government and the CIA Mafia. Apparently this is the problem with governments world wide, including Israel.