Intro: An interesting study of WhatsApp usage by scholars of IIT Khargapur and the MIIT of USA reveals the dangerous phenomena.
With India having the largest user-base of 487 million and a user growth rate of 16.6 per cent every year, WhatsApp has emerged as the biggest carrier of what is now called ‘fear speech’ — adding fuel to the rising trend of hate politics and fake news in the country.
An interesting study of WhatsApp usage by a group of scholars of IIT Khargapur and the MIIT of USA reveals this dangerous phenomena: “On platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the platforms can monitor content being posted and hence provide content moderation tools and countering mechanisms in place like suspension of the user and blocking of the post for limiting the use of harmful/hateful language. WhatsApp, on the other hand, is an end-to-end encrypted platform, where the message can be seen only by the end-users. This makes the spread of any form of harmful content in such platforms much easier.”
With use of violent, aggressive, repetitive hate crimes and vicious trolling, especially against women, as seen during the spiral of vicious violence on women in Manipur, India and the world has been shocked at the cruelty and vulgarity inherent in this new, sinister phenomena. This is one of the latest examples of the use of this digital platform to spread hate and terrorize the ‘victim-groups’.
The scholars have written in a paper, ‘Short is the Road that Leads from Fear to Hate’, that ‘fear speech’ in Indian WhatsApp Groups is happening regularly. They have identified fear speech, which is defined as “an expression aimed at instilling (existential) fear of a target (ethnic or religious) group”.
In these types of messages, fear may be generated in various forms. These forms include, and are not limited to, alleged harmful things done by the target groups in the past or present (and the possibility of that happening again). This includes a particular tradition of the group which is portrayed in a negative manner. Though it cannot be pinpointed if fear speech is the cause of the violence, “it lowers the threshold to violence”, the paper pointed out.
The scholars came to the conclusion in a recent article that “following the data collection strategy from Garimella et al, we collected the data from over 5,000 such groups, gathering more than 2 million posts. Using this data, we manually curated a dataset of 27k posts out of which 8,000 posts were fear speech and 19, 000 were non-fear speech. Specifically, we made the following contributions. For the first time, our work quantitatively identifies the prevalence and dynamics of fear speech at a scale, on WhatsApp, which is the most popular social media in India. We do this by curating a large dataset of fear speech. The dataset consists of 7,845 fear speech and 19,107 non-fear speech WhatsApp posts. The dataset will be made public after the completion of the review process of the paper. We develop models that can automatically identify messages containing fear speech.”
Observers in India are aware of how WhatsApp can be used as a vehicle to spread hate and fear by hate groups and is cited as one of the reasons to ban the Internet in troubled areas. India has had the largest number of annual bans on Internet services in troubled areas. During the last 11 years, India saw Internet shutdowns in various areas, numbering 767 and 424 in Jammu and Kashmir alone, says the website which tracks the internet shutdowns.
The shutdowns have been cited as a reason to control the spread of violence in disturbed areas; in recent months in states like Manipur too. These shutdowns have earned India a reputation of a country trapped in constant upheavals.
According to a recent report by the US commission mandated to monitor religious freedom globally, India is one of the 14 countries where religious minorities have been constantly under attack in recent times. In India, most of the religious conflicts are between Hindus and Muslims who form 79 and 13 per cent of the population, respectively.
It could be the war in Palestine, the siege of Gaza, or Indian elections, the information warfare between opposing groups are often on WhatsApp channels now. There is increasing pressure on all digital platforms to reign in fake news and hate content. However, vested interests continue to get away with innovative messaging content on their platforms.
Most social media platforms have their internal regulatory mechanism put in place – they are under pressure from various governments. With the new format of WhatsApp channels getting popular, their direct one-way reach could be a big challenge to all regulators, internal and external.
As India enters the election mode for the assembly polls and also the crucial 2024 general elections, it is high time that the Election Commission of India seriously examines the issue of fear speech, which could turn out to be worse than hate speech in a democracy. The technologists might take some time to develop methods to identify and regulate fear speech and hate politics, but, in the interim, there is a need for regulating such groups so as to ensure free and fair elections in a country which prides itself as the largest democracy.
