CLEARING THE HEARSAY

INTRODUCTION:

‘All the World’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’ It is a well renowned extract from a Shakespearean monologue, that seeks to make man understand their transient nature. However, we have to appreciate the fact that each man to walk the land has a purpose to serve, a part to play. Some play a role of chaos and some play the role of calming the repercussions caused by them. Through a survey conducted, it was brought out that as of September 2012, Facebook recorded 1 billion active users, 500 million active users in Twitter with 340 million tweets and 1.6 billion search requests. In contrast with traditional methodologies of communication, social media allows individuals to engage in timely and direct end consumer communication at lower costs and higher levels of efficiency. This Article seeks to bring out the effects caused due to the lies and rumours being spread with the Internet as a conduit and how the smoke can be cleared, to bring out the truth through the confusion and fear.

TRAVEL THROUGH TIME:

The Internet is a phenomenon that has cut through time and ages, that has reached all rich and poor alike. The World Wide Web has become an indispensable necessity, one that is as normal and as required as the air we breathe. The Internet that was commissioned in 1960s by the United States Department of Defence¹ has the potential to break through barriers of time and space allowing us to be anywhere, anytime, and sometimes even in multiple places at once. Through a trickle effect, multifaceted technologies emerged from the Internet and one of the innovations is what we now fondly call the ‘social media’; that shrunk the Globe to the palm of the hand. And thus, that which began as a means of defence has now mandated the defence to protect the people from it. Social media encompasses a gamut of applications that includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and many more, allowing individuals to share data and communicate, pan time zones. Social media are web-based communication tools that enable people to interact with each other by sharing and consuming information.

Social media also carries with it various nefarious issues, ranging from cyberbullying, cyberstalking, spamming and through time there have been many controversies and dangerous online trends like the blue whale challenge that took the lives of hundreds of children and teenagers. It then dawned on us, the magnitude of harm the internet could cause when an individual from Russia could manipulate children all over the World, without ever having to meet them. Another ugly face of social media is the ability of it to carry fake news in order to drive traffic towards them and most of the time, users do not know that they are fake in the first. Social media also has the ability to be hacked remotely despite having multiple layers of security and privacy options in place, with many sites not bestowing the privacy and also sharing the keystrokes of the User to multiple applications.

‘How much privacy is too much privacy?’, is a question lingering in the minds of every individual who has ever had access to social media. When an individual randomly searches for a product from the comfort of his/her home, every other application that he/she visits post the search will have banners and pop ups in relation to the product that he/she had searched for. This stands as testament that every keystroke of an individual is shared with multiple sites and applications, for a plethora of reasons, alas to the detriment of the internet user.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS:

‘We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain’ said Stephen Hawking in an interview with USA today⁴ citing how anyone, anywhere in the World can react to everything happening everywhere. Thus, is the power of the internet and social media, becoming a platform for both development and murky affairs alike. The Social media is an interactive version of the pulpit scene in ‘Julius Caesar’. When Brutus said Julius Caesar was evil, people believed he was evil and raised against him, lauding his murderers and when Mark Antony said he was a good Samaritan, the same people rose against those who killed him. This ideology of man to be easily swayed in accordance to and by the news that feeds his own beliefs is what enables social media to thrive and what mandates its close supervision and parallel placing of checks and balances.

Time and again rumours have surfaced and have been quashed, ranging from celebrity deaths to medicinal breakthroughs. They sometimes also take the shape of white lies that are harmless and simply exist to garner attention and followers. However, when lies are fed to break the democracy in a Nation, to incite people to revolt against their motherland, to feed fear and discord, they cease to be a mere disadvantage of the web and become something more nefarious, a forum for anti-national elements to dwell, preach and turn law abiding citizens against the Nation. When musing over how rumours spread in social media, it can be understood through various research that the Internet’s topological structure is far more similar to society’s structure⁵. Individuals live in a combined social and communicating World created by social media. Rumours can be defined as unverified accounts or explanations of events that circulate from person to person. These explanations might be related to objects, events or issues that demand public concern. The SIS model⁶ which divides the homogenous society into S-Spreaders (Individuals who actively spread a rumour), I-Ignorants (individuals who have not yet heard a rumour) and S- Stiflers (individuals who have already been informed of the rumour but have ceased spreading it). Through this model, it is vital to understand that rumours are not viruses. Individuals have the capacity and the capability to rationally decide whether they should believe or spread a rumour that they have come across. The decisions ultimately taken are based on their locations in the network, the layers in which those decisions were made and the location(s) from which the information originated.

HOW ARE RUMOURS SPREAD?:

It is believed through various models that rumours travel through multiple channels. A typical social structure in which each person maintains an average of two contact channels. Rumour mongering operates through the inception and maintenance of varied social layers, both long- distance and short-distance. However, it has been observed that a major chunk of the populace involved in the spreading of rumours have no links at all. In the time-space spectrum, people create gatherings in their social structures to discuss well- known issues, in the social media paradigm. These discussions then tend to produce fragile opinions because those opinions are based on discussions of information and not on factual demonstration, in the practical sense. It is a well-accepted theory that people make links based on completely random opportunities and individuals will connect with each other if they possess a mutual member in the ensuing conversation/discussion. It can sometimes be observed that in social media, people make links based on completely random opportunities.

Rumours will ultimately end if the spreading rate decreases. However, if the spreading rate remains unchanged and static, some rumours have the capacity to die out suddenly, some might have the potential to linger on for a long time and some have the trait of resurfacing after dying out. This serves to be the most practical model persistent in social media. The most important factor that contributes to the same are social interactions, wherein information spreads from one hub and then touches another hub by chance. Rumour spreading also encompasses two phases; in the first phase, a rumour spreads and in the second phase, new information spreads to enforce the idea that the previous information was a rumour. This second spreading process is referred to as rumour stopping. This process typically involves topic transformation for the already spread rumours. This second phase is where the necessity lies. Rumour clearers play an indispensable role in the system, with individuals capable of influencing the social strata on a higher pedestal to perform the job, going by the thesis that information spreads through both random channels and through mutual acquaintances. Rumours, to be stopped, have been classified through a semantic analysis, with the attitudes identified based on the individual’s perception towards the information. They are, completely believable rumours, hard to estimate rumours, skeptical rumours (i.e) with dependency on another to clarify the same and lastly, unbelievable rumours. It is important to utilise these yardsticks to effectively stop the rumour mongering.

MEASURES TO TRACK AND TRACE:

The most recent development with regards to the Information Technology arena is the enactment of the Information and Technology Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules in February 2021. The rules largely covers over-the-top (OTT) platforms and social media in general. The new rules have been passed under Sections 69A(2), 79(2)(c) and 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, superseding the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2011.The main crux of the rules are as under:-

• Aims to provide a robust complaint mechanism for the users of social media and covers OTT platforms to address their grivances.
  • Social media platforms to set up a grievances redressal and compliance mechanism.
  • Monthly reports on complaints received from users and corresponding actions taken to be submitted to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
  • Instant messaging applications (such as Whatsapp) to make provisions for tracking the first originator of a message.
• Special emphasis placed on the protection of women and children from sexual offences on social media.
• Stresses the point that online content publishers and social media intermediaries should follow the Constitution and subject themselves to any and all domestic laws.

It has also been laid down that all the rules should be followed in letter and spirit and any non- compliance will lead to revocation of the indemnity provided to the applications under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act that mentions that as long as a platform acts just as the messenger, carrying a message from pt A to pt B, without interfering in any manner, it will be safe from any legal prosecution brought upon it due to the transmission of the message. These measures have also been placed to ensure that rumours do not spread in the State, in any manner whatsoever and anyone who does propagate rumours that have the capacity to instigate violence can be traced by the social media applications upon orders to do the same. In furtherance to the above, social media intermediaries have been divided into two based upon the user size, social media intermediaries and significant social media intermediaries.

Various users, intermediaries, instant messaging applications and Over-the-top platforms have been entrusted with a diligent duty to perform acts to the best satisfaction of the laws of the land and is seen by one group of people as a means to reduce the rate of rumour mongering especially in sensitive areas such as Jammu and Kashmir. On the other hand, certain stakeholders also feel that such rules will further hamper the security algorithms already in existence enabling the service providers to access more information than they should.

MISINFORMATION IN THE VALLEY:

The situation in Jammu and Kashmir has always been an issue of international scrutiny and an affair of many wars and treaties. For time immemorial, the beautiful land mass of Kashmir has been embroiled in clashes aplenty. What started out as diplomatic conversations, evolved into fights, wars, battles… and now cyber rumour warfare. Through various social media handles like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and the like, with hashtags that classify all information relating to one topic in one place, it has become extremely easy for information to spread like a raging wildfire. It is also interesting to note that in this era where smartphones are easily available at a low cost, it has been possible to also create multiple accounts and multiple pages by one individual to disseminate the rumours at a faster rate. It has been observed by Jency Jacob, managing editor of BOOM, a website which works in partnership with Facebook to fact check stories and tags specific posts spreading misinformation on the platform, said social media users were sharing fake news blindly and emotions were running high through the same⁹. Facebook has also vowed to treat discussions on Kashmir with top priority and to remove content that violates its community standards through fact-checking in 10 languages.

Throughout the years, it has been observed that the internet has enabled fabricated news of protests, uprisings, stone pelting, crackdowns and the like during unprecedented times causing further unrest and chaos making it an arduous task to establish calm and peace in the Valley at a faster rate. It has also been observed that such data is fed into the databases by radical individuals and agencies from Pak and the same transcends borders and finds itself being shared by Indians living in the Valley and out, unbeknownst to its falsities. Zeroing in on every individual who shares and posts such false data also becomes a daunting task since rounding every individual up is like finding needles in a haystack.

Through a scrutiny of social media sites, the perpetrators are following the trend of taking advantage of any current crisis or situation and fabricating details, pictures and data that aim to blow the looming crisis out of proportion. Photoshopped images are also on the rise with many individuals having learnt the knack of using the technology, so as to entice people to believe the data they share. But, we, unfortunately are living in a world where we should not believe in what is seen, heard or said and should research on any word and any page before arriving at a conclusion. Various lies of all shades are also released and shared by individuals regarding the Governance of the Nation, the Armed forces, the geopolitical situations, on a range of assorted topics that are baseless allegations with no factual backing, whatsoever.

COMBATING RUMOURS AND INSTILLING PEACE:

The petulant behaviour of India’s neighbours and its many layered attempts to break the peace and harmony of the Valley has time and again been thwarted, through cyber means, by controlling the use of the internet or by reducing the internet bandwidth. Various attempts have been undertaken, both by establishing a positive presence in all arenas of Social Media and also by cutting off the access to internet resources to counter and combat the spread of fear, that serves to be the greatest accelerator for terror and chaos.

Fear and doubt when fed occasionally with rumours and false information, with the aim of enhancing them, has a cascading effect. It multiples doubts, increases confusion and this in turn makes people turn against their own land. With various questions having arisen in the past as to how a region’s internet and communication can be cut off, the masses fail to understand that the same is done for ensuring peace and stability in the Valley, to ensure that the negative elements of the society will not be able to carry out any attacks with ease, that would cause heavy losses and damage to the civilian population. It has also been observed that these anti- national elements have the capacity to target the population with sensitive content both moral and religious in nature, to sway the temperament of the common folk. This will only fuel the fire and set the people on a path of confusion, since the internet is a vast universe with millions of inter-connected people who might share information without knowledge of its false and malicious nature. Along with the usage of jammers during convoy movement, reducing the internet bandwidth and temporarily shutting off access to the internet are some of the measures employed to ensure the reduction in speed of rumour spreading.

The above is just few of the many posts in the Web that does not hold any truth or sanctity in itself. This is precisely why it is mandated to control or severe the usage of internet facilities in times of havoc in order to ensure peace in the Valley subsists. This process and concept, for ease of assimilation, can be equated to the mandate of social distancing in the wake of Covid- 19, required and necessary to ensure that the issue at hand does not become worse and to cut the rate of spreading. The virus of false propaganda and rumours is as dangerous as the spread of a biological virus, with the former leading to the death of democracy, so to say.

CONCLUSION:

Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the Axe’. To achieve any form and any means of growth and development, it is imperative that multifaceted methods of various degrees are undertaken to ensure that all are travelling with the same rapport and towards the same goal. Due to the growing number of social media users, rumour spreading has become a serious issue that affects both the normal social order and the public opinion of the online environment. The Kashmir Valley, the Paradise on Earth, should be made a paradise in all ways… which is the ambition of the Nation. In order to reach this ambition, it is sometimes imperative to cull out the truth from the false, to identify peace from violence and place a step forward towards a streamlined democracy, a united Nation.