What would you do, if a gang of angry bikers started chasing you as you were driving through a region foreign to you? You’d panic, and so did Tanaji, a 50-year-old auto-driver on his way back after ferrying passengers to a nearby village.
On an average day, there was no good reason for Tanaji and his auto to appear in this village. But this wasn’t an average day, with the MSRTC employees on strike, all the bus services were off. As the angry bikers approached, Tanaji started speeding his auto. Scared for his life, with the bikers on his trail, he drove into the village, where there was an angry mob blocking the road, waiting for him.
Terrified, Tanaji abandoned his auto and started running, the mob frantically chasing after him. In a matter of a few minutes, the mob, now 1500 people big, got hold of the auto-driver, dragging him onto the streets with punches and kicks flying in from every direction. His auto was set ablaze. He wasn’t even fighting anymore, lying still on the ground, but the mob wouldn’t stop raining blows on him.
“These were people I see every day, people I live with, call my friends. I never knew what we were capable of,” says Yogendra, a local shopkeeper, as he recalls the incident.
This was certainly not the turn I was expecting the conversation to take. It was the summer of 2019. I had come to Halgara, a drought-prone village looking for stories of the drought-affected humans of various demographics. Here I was, sitting at a local grocery shop sipping my 4th cup of tea for the day with the words “I never knew what we were capable of” ringing in my ears over and over with a static silence in the background.
“So what happened?” I ask.
Forwards.
“Over the last few weeks, a rumour had been making multiple rounds on the local WhatsApp groups – that child abductors are coming to town. The bikers, seeing an alien vehicle outside the village, started chasing it, and as they did, they alerted the people in the village that the alleged kidnappers were heading towards the town.”
The idea that this small, insignificant act of sharing a random forward, without a second thought, would lead to so many lives being destroyed was hard-hitting.
I see my family, my teachers, and people I admire and respect sharing dozens and dozens of forwards and chain messages, I see them reacting to it, falling for it. I see them get sucked into cults and conspiracy theories. Something that I always disregarded as not worth my time and energy to address. But this was the first time I came across a real-life repercussion caused by the virtual world. I wonder what I would do in that situation.
Am I capable of that? I’d like to think I am not.
Good Morning, WhatsApp Households
With over 400 million users and billions of messages sent across its servers every day, India is one of the biggest markets for WhatsApp.
Thanks to cheap smartphones and cheaper data, the internet has reached millions of people.
But for many, the internet is synonymous with a bunch of platforms, and their daily lives revolve around these, Whatsapp being one of them. Countless users wake up to tap through “statuses” or exchange fancy good morning messages every morning.
Colourful, aggressive flowers floating with elaborate texts wishing you a good evening, quotes and Urdu poetry – WhatsApp forwards are a big creative outlet for many.
Due to the popularity of the messaging service clubbed with staggeringly low levels of digital literacy, WhatsApp has established itself as one of the primary sources of information in Indian households.
Beyond the harmless creative forwards, WhatsApp is also full of opinionated and unverified news, political propaganda fueled by IT cells, home remedies, historical trivia talking about the lost Hindu glory, hyperlocal rumours, hate speech and it’s a slippery slope beyond this.
Journey Of A WhatsApp Forward: What Makes Them Tick?
You open WhatsApp, you come across a message marked “forwarded”. You go through the message. What happens next? This chart by #ekminuteproject outlines the split-second journey from receiving a forward to sharing it ahead. The user is most inclined to share something which:
- Affirms/Validates their bias: Something that confirms their already existing beliefs.
- Best Nation Award from UNESCO: Something that is attributed to a well-known personality, or organisation
- Mere exposure effect: Something that users in the ecosystem come across repeatedly and develop a liking for. The good-morning images are a great example.
- Data voids and FOMO: Covid home remedies to tulsi leaves in phone covers. From silly novel ideas to fake historical trivia or medical advice.
- Proximity: Something that appeals to a person’s sense of identity, culture, geography.
The journey only lasts for a split second, and sometimes, the fate of countless is decided within that period of time. Neither Yogendra nor his fellow townspeople knew what this split-second would cost them.
Nor did so many people across India. From remote rural areas to metropolitan cities, the epidemic of unverified forwards does not differentiate. But it’s not always that the consequences are so direct and so tangible.
Wreaking Havoc, Many Forwards At A Time
Information is fundamental. The process of consuming information, processing it, and propagating it is integral to life. You take actions in life, based on the knowledge you acquire, the experiences you have, the information you consume. What happens if something so fundamental to life breaks down?
We can’t agree on simple facts anymore.
Is climate change real? Is the earth flat or a sphere? Is Rowan Atkinson dead or alive? Is the Taj Mahal actually Tejo Mahalya? Do Obama and Hillary stink? The pandemic has only amplified what we have seen over the last two decades, from the dangerous anti-vax movement to downright denial of the Covid-19 virus and beyond.
The Netflix film Don’t Look Up captures this ‘infocalypse’ in a horrifyingly comedic manner. How vested interests and social media polarise society enough, that a vast section of it chooses to live in denial of a VERY real space rock heading directly towards them.
While there is no such rock threatening our existence, there is an abundance of polarisation aided by confirmation bias and algorithmic eco-chambers that is tearing apart modern society.
Since my conversation with Yogendra, a lot has changed.
For one thing, WhatsApp doesn’t allow its users to forward a message to more than five people at a time anymore. While that has helped the situation, it clearly isn’t enough. Algorithmic bubbles have gotten worse, political parties are resorting to sophisticated technologies for amplifying their propaganda.
Trust in society is at an all-time low. More and more citizens are coming online, and as they do, the problem only gets worse.
But we’ve also seen the people fight back. We’ve seen people across the world come together to fight this epidemic. I’ve been fortunate enough to play a small role in this fight. From curating digital literacy workshops for first-time internet users in rural Maharashtra, organizing regular townhalls on civic issues to fight polarization to working with the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) on building digital literacy.
And yet, Yogendra’s voice, “I never knew what we were capable of” still occasionally haunts me.
The birth of every medium has always been a tectonic event for society. The battle is uphill. On some days, it feels almost perpendicular.
But with a little bit of love and empathy, life always prevails.
This is the first part of the three-part series on ‘rise of misinformation and astroturfing’ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The second and third parts can be found here and here.