Twitter was an “emblem of honesty” as long as the current regime in Delhi could milk the platform but the moment farmers’ protests started getting traction it became “a dangerous medium to promote enmity and polarisation”, a retired civil servant said on Saturday.
“They had no problems with Twitter till a few days ago. An army of online trolls used, and continue to use, the medium to abuse any opposing voice. But the moment the farmers’ protests started becoming viral, the government has turned against the platform,” said Jawhar Sircar, who retired as the CEO of Prasar Bharati in 2016.
Sircar was one of the speakers at the launch of a book that tracks the “unprecedented amount of fake, hateful and inflammatory information” on Facebook and WhatsApp in India.
Twitter had been asked by the government to take down multiple accounts that were allegedly sharing misinformation and provocative content around the ongoing farmers’ agitation. It had also been warned of penal action for non-compliance. There is no clarity, however, in the public domain about what exactly was offensive about those accounts.
The micro-blogging platform on Wednesday said it has withheld some of the accounts flagged by the Indian government for blocking “within India only”, but has not blocked handles of civil society activists, politicians and media as “it would violate their fundamental right to free expression” guaranteed under Indian law.
The book, Facebook: Mukh O Mukhosh (Face and the mask) has “revisited” the 2019 book, The Real Face of Facebook in India, authored by journalists Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, which had taken “a critical look at the working of Facebook and WhatsApp” in the Indian socio-political context.
The Bengali book released on Saturday has been co-authored by Sam, Guha Thakurta and Arka Deb, a journalist based in Calcutta. The new book comprises 30 chapters compared to 20 in the original.
“Take any riot and or any communal violence in India in the past few years — a Facebook or WhatsApp post has played a key role behind it,” said Guha Thakurta.
At Saturday’s launch, the authors and panellists spoke in the same vein on how social media played a key role in the recent flare-ups in Bengal. The authors had toured some of the violence-affected places.
The incidents, they said, were projected as if one community was behind all the violence. “Rumours and fake information are key ingredients of any riot. The advent of these social media platforms has made spreading of rumours and fake news much easier than it was,” said Deb.
Sircar, who has spent over four decades in the Indian Administrative Service, remembered “being abused by 7,000 people” for one tweet. “The social media platforms have become what port areas used to be when we were growing up. People advised you not to venture into a port area after sundown because you could be robbed, attacked… anything could happen. These mediums have become like the port areas,” he said.
Kumar Rana, social scientist and former project director with Pratichi trust, said counter abuse was not the right way to fight the online machinery of the Right-wing ecosystem. “We cannot match them in creating fake content and abuse. But what we can do is try to understand the person in front of us. I cannot discuss lofty issues in JNU-language with a villager. I have to speak a language that he understands,” said Rana.
