Mobs can’t distinguish fact from falsehood

Fake news didn’t start with Donald Trump. He merely raised it to an unprecedented level. Or to an un-presidented level. And that’s the last time I shall refer to him in today’s column.

Because on July 19, 1692, 326 years ago this last week, the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts had their first mass execution. They hanged seven women and one man.

One woman, Bridget Bishop, had been hanged a month earlier.

Wikipedia lists 110 people executed as witches, mostly in Europe. By the 1600s, the hysteria had started to fade in Europe. But not in the Puritan colonies on this side of the Atlantic.

Salem had a reputation as a fractious town, divided by local feuds. Town meetings tended to turn into physical fights. Most histories now portray the witchcraft trials as an extension of those feuds.

For example, that first man hanged was a minister, the Rev. George Burroughs. He was often overdue paying his debts to a prominent local family, the Putnam’s. It seems no coincidence that the gaggle of teenage girls who made accusations against 200 or so Salem residents were led by the Putnam’s daughter Abigail.

Martha Carrier, one of those hanged July 19, had a dispute with her neighbor, Benjamin Abbott, over land boundaries. After one heated exchange, Abbott fell ill, and accused Carrier of bewitching him.

The malicious intent of the accusers showed up most clearly into two of the executions.

John Proctor, a respected member of Salem Village, was convinced Abigail Putnam’s gang of girls were only pretending to be afflicted. He threatened to beat them until they confessed. They won.

Rebecca Nurse, considered pious and devout, was convicted with no credible evidence against her. Thirty-nine Salem residents risked their own safety to sign a petition in Nurse’s support.

The witchcraft frenzy in Salem began in February 1692. It lasted little more than one year, fading out in May 1693.

Which reinforces the common interpretation that the charges were cooked up.

The 20 persons hung during that vendetta were victims of fake news. Fabricated information, unsupported by fact.

What makes this more than an abstract history lesson is that this month, a 32-year-old software engineer working for Google was beaten to death in India.

While driving home from a social event, for unknown reasons, the four men stopped to hand out chocolates to local schoolgirls walking home by the side of the road. A passer-by accused the men of child-snatching. A hostile crowd gathered. The four men, realizing their danger, sped off.

But they reckoned without the Internet. Some of the villagers used WhatsApp to circulate pictures of the men, with a description of their car. (Ironically, WhatsApp belongs to Google’s rival Facebook.)

By the time the four men got to the next village, villagers had blocked the road. A mob of “around 2,000 people,” dragged the men out of their car, “and beat them mercilessly,” according to a local member of the state legislature.

Fake news strikes again. This was not an isolated incident. The problem of child abductions is real enough. In Karachi, Pakistan, over 3,000 children were kidnapped last year alone. Possibly for international adoptions. Possibly for child trafficking. Possibly for slave labour.

Indian authorities claim to have “busted” a baby-trafficking ring run by -- of all people! -- the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa.

But, fear has led to its own problems. Rumours on WhatsApp alone have led to at least a dozen deaths in India. Twenty people have been lynched on suspicion of child abduction. A few of these incidents were apparently influenced by a staged video intended to show how easily kidnappers can seize a child.

A similar number have been lynched by socalled “cow vigilantes,” for selling beef.

India’s ruling BJP party has not yet taken any action to denounce these extra-judicial lynchings. Just as the U.S. Congress has never yet passed even one piece of anti-lynching legislation -- despite records showing that 4723 people, two-thirds of them black, have lost their lives in lynchings.

There is no way now to determine if any of those lynchings were based on hard evidence. Or how many, like the witches of Salem, were based on malicious gossip.

Once upon a time, gossip spread only by word of mouth, person to person. Now it can be instantaneous, cellphone to cellphone.

And most people, it seems, don’t know how to distinguish truth and fact from falsehood and distortion.

Which makes unfounded, untested, fake news more dangerous than ever.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca