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WHATSAPP AND VIOLENCE: THE DEADLY FORWARDS

WHATSAPP AND VIOLENCE: THE DEADLY FORWARDS

INTRODUCTION

"It might be true that law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."

                                                                                                            -Martin Luther King Jr.

Mob lynching is a type of violence that can be compared to crimes against the human body and property. The mob claims that the accused is punished for doing anything wrong, which is not necessarily something illegal and they take the law into their own hands without complying with any legislation to prosecute the supposed accused. The Supreme Court rightly referred to mob lynching as a 'horrendous act of mobocracy'.[1] In the case of Tahseen S. Poonawala v. Union of India (2018), the Supreme court of India had put forward some measures that were to be taken to curb the menace of Mob lynching’s or violence.[2] The measures that were put forward were namely preventive, remedial and punitive in nature. Later, in the year 2019 the court asked the central and state governments to provide the court with the insight of the initiatives taken by them to stop these acts of violence. But currently there are only three states which have legislated provisions to deal with this issue. These are the states of Manipur, Rajasthan and Jharkhand. Recently, Nityanand Rai who is the minister of state for home affairs informed the Lok Sabha that the NCRB stopped the collection of data related to the cases of mob lynching, hate crimes and cow vigilantism after 2017. According to the minister the reason for the same was that the data cannot be considered reliable as these crimes were not defined under law.[3] Now, one of the primary reasons in the current discourse that can be attributed to fuel these acts by mobs are messages and posts forwarded by individuals on social media and messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. It is so because a series of these acts have happened just because of fake news about child abductors forwarded primarily on Whatsapp. This article analyses the intermediary role played by social media platforms in acts of mob lynching’s and the possible steps that can be taken to limit these incidents.

 

WHY WHATSAPP HAS BECOME THE PRIMARY PLATFORM FOR SHARING SUCH FAKE NEWS/ RUMOURS

 

Rumours/Fake news act the same way as catalysts do in a chemical reaction for the people who indulge themselves in lynching activities. The role of a catalyst in a chemical reaction is to speed up the reaction rate without getting consumed. The same way rumours in the last two years have acted like a catalyst in indulging mob to commit acts of violence which still seems to have no end. These fake new/ rumours are spread through various social media and messaging platforms. These platforms include Facebook, Whatsapp and twitter. In the past few years, we’ve seen incidents of mob violence which happened after circulation of messages containing false information and doctored graphics on the Whatsapp messaging platform. Whatsapp, currently has a total of 487.5 million active users in India.[4] So, it is important to have some accountability for the acts of mob violence which are triggered by fake news and graphics forwarded or circulated using the app.  

Currently these social media giants get the ‘safe-harbour’ protection under Section 79[5] of the Information Technology Act, 2000 that is, these intermediaries are merely a platform which allows a third party to share information or graphics. Also, these intermediaries cannot be considered to have any part in creation of these information or graphics. This provision can be considered to be very important in a country like India as it allows small intermediaries to work without having the fear of facing any rigid legal action in case of an act by a third party. But the government (central and states) has the power to issue directions for interception or for monitoring or for decryption of any information published through any computer source. So, for an intermediary to escape liability under this section 69[6], it has to prove that the intermediary did not initiate the circulation of the message through which the information or graphics in question were shared. Also, the intermediary shouldn’t have selected the receiver and revised any information or graphical details of the message in question.

Whatsapp has an end-to-end encrypted system, that is, the messages and information shared by any person to another person or group cannot be accessed by any other person or the intermediary itself. Furthermore, this feature benefits the intermediary, that is, Whatsapp in this case as they are not obligated to save messages and information shared in the chats. Thus, the intermediary is able to save money and have more active users without much investment. To simplify it, let us take the example of a safety case which can be opened via two keys. So, when a person opens the safe with the first key and keeps something (herein, information of graphics), that something can be opened by only the person who has the other key and not even the person who manufactured the safe can access it. The manufacturer thus saves the cost of having to keep any information about the things kept in the safe and can sell more cases without having to worry about the information of things saved in the already sold cases. But this very feature of the messaging app (Whatsapp) has proved to have some repercussions as information or graphics shared in a message cannot be traced, that is, where the message has originated in cases of spread of fake news/rumours cannot be traced as it would break the end-to-end encryption system of the app. Also, the breaking of this system would indirectly result in the breach of privacy of its users.

Now, the government of India in February 2021 brought in The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules.[7] One of the problematic rules laid down in it was that the post or message containing any questionable information or graphical content was to be traced now. So, as mentioned before it would violate a user’s right to privacy ensured by the end-to-end encrypted system. Also, the provision of tracing a message wouldn’t prove to be very useful as the originator of the information or graphical content contained in the message can be different from the person who is traced breaking the end-to-end encrypted system. In other words, the person who reshares the content of the message in question might have received it on another app or via email or might have taken a screenshot and shared it by his number. Thus, it becomes very difficult to trace the originator of a message and can lead to catching of innocent people who shared that information believing it to be true.[8] Overall, this rule by breaking the end-to-end encrypted system violates the right to privacy of a significant number of users. Also, messaging platforms like Whatsapp can escape the liability under section 69[9] of the Information Technology Act, 2000 if the government cannot prove that the message circulation was initiated, the receiver was selected and the content of the message was altered in any way by the intermediary, which in this case is Whatsapp.

 

WHAT CAN BE DONE TO STOP THIS DIGITAL MENACE?

 

There are a few things that can be done to deal with these issues. Firstly, comes the point of reducing the legal immunity provided to these intermediaries under Section 79[10] of the Information Technology Act, 2000. As an established messaging app having around 450 million users in India, Whatsapp shouldn’t be provided with the complete legal immunity and should be told to increase the money it spends in acquiring AI and new algorithms to filter fake news/ rumours from being circulated. Also, the act of reducing the legal immunity will make the messaging company act more seriously towards addressing the issue of stopping the spread of fake news/rumours. Secondly, we are also aware of the fact that digital literacy hasn’t increased with the same speed as internet use has in our country. according to a data published by ‘ideas for India’, the total digital literacy in India including urban and rural households is 38%.[11] Whereas there is a significant difference in digital literacy when we compare rural and urban households, that is, 25% in rural households and 61% in urban households.[12] So, it becomes necessary for the government as well as the stakeholders to take steps in increasing the overall digital literacy of the nation. Thirdly, using the very data given above and the experience of an IPS officer named Rema Rajeshwari who served as the district police chief of Jogulamba Gadwal, Telangana, it is important to recognize the roles of the police officials in preventing incidents of mob lynching’s.[13] As described by the officer, the people of this village were sleeping inside their houses in extreme summer due to the fear of a doctored video (as verified later), they had received on Whatsapp. These graphics combined with rumours of child abduction resulting in these villagers taking law in their own hands by restraining and beating up strangers. So, the way they countered this incident was by spreading information, making Whatsapp group of head where they clarified these misinformation’s and taught the villagers of how the verification of fake news should be done. Lastly, media houses can be used to counter the fake news/ rumours by broadcasting the content of the message in question and informing the people of the same.

Therefore, the menace of mob lynching spreading through messages on Whatsapp can be countered by coordination between government, the intermediaries and the police. Also, the only possible way of making the intermediaries play an active role in curbing this menace is by reducing the complete legal immunity they receive.

 

 

[1] Iain Marlow & Upamanyu Trivedi, India's Supreme Court Recommends Parliament Act on Mob Lynchings, Bloomberg Qunit (December 21, 2021, 03:30 pm), https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/india-s-supreme-court-recommends-parliament-act-on-mob-lynchings.

[2]Tahseen S. Poonawla v. Union of India (2018) 9 SCC 501.

[3] Ananya Bhardwaj, NCRB stopped collecting data on lynching, hate crime as it was ‘unreliable’, govt tells LS, ThePrint (December 21, 2021, 03:45pm), https://theprint.in/india/governance/ncrb-stopped-collecting-data-on-lynching-hate-crime-as-it-was-unreliable-govt-tells-ls/785201/.

[4] WhatsApp users in selected countries 2021 | Statista Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/289778/countries-with-the-most-facebook-users/.

[5] Information Technology Act, 2000 s 79.

[6] Information Technology Act, 2000 s 69.

[8] WhatsApp Help Center, What is traceability and why does WhatsApp oppose it?, (WhatsApp.com), https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/what-is-traceability-and-why-does-whatsapp-oppose-it/?lang=en.  (Last visited Dec 22, 2021).

[9] Information Technology Act, 2000 s 69.

[10] Information Technology Act, 2000 s 79.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Rema Rajeshwari, Mob Lynching and Social Media, 14 YALE J. INT'l AFF. 14 (2019).

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