3 seers among 6 saved from lynching in Assam
In two separate incidents, six persons, including three seers, were rescued in different parts of Assam from crowds suspecting them to be child lifters.
The first incident was reported on Thursday morning from Mahur town, close to Tripura, where three ‘godmen’ had halted for the night on their way to the Sundari temple in Tripura.
“We spent the night on the highway. In the morning, we went to Haflong to fuel up the car,” said Sunil Puri, one of the seers, and a resident of Gujarat. The other two, Lalit Ban and Amar Giri, are from UP. ”
One of the three, then got off at the town’s railway station. “Suddenly, two boys came and asked us for our identity cards,” Puri recalled.
As the mob swelled, Puri ran inside the station.
“The station master told us to approach the Army,” he said. The territorial army is stationed there.
“It was an uncontrollable situation. To placate the crowd, we took the three inside with us and asked about 20 aggressive people in the crowd to come and ask them questions,” Pushpraj Singh, additional superintendent of police, Dima Hasao said.
“It was a case of mob frenzy. The mob was repeatedly saying ‘Bahar Nikalo,’” Singh added.
The second incident was reported from about 25 kms away from Haflong, where three vendors from Uttar Pradesh were saved by the timely intervention of the police.
“An angry mob had surrounded them when the police intervened and took them to safer location,” a district police officer said.
Singh said rumours on social media tools such as WhatsApp have become difficult to control. “We are trying to talk to the community leaders and students organisations,” he said. No arrests have been made in the two cases so far.
GUWAHATI:
Ananth Padmanabhan,
Technology can never be perfectly regulated using legal instruments and coercion. It requires a combination of instruments including behavioural norms and technology features.
To the extent technology features can be used to address the issue of misinformation, WhatsApp appears to be on the right track. Reliance on deep learning tools is no different from how PayPal successfully addressed fraudulent transfers using pattern analysis. Digital literacy, addressed towards better behavioural norms, is again a long-term goal. A major gap in this letter (sent by
WhatsApp to government) though is on the issue of suspending user accounts based on assessment of their behaviour. Any such policy needs careful thought as free speech concerns are implicated.
Apar Gupta,
No (they are not enough), misinformation and propganda cannot be stopped at the platform level within WhatsApp without compromising privacy. It is important to consider this as it’s an instant messaging platform and not a social media network with public posts. It seems as if the government is putting the onus of maintaining law and order on
WhatsApp. We’re noticing the failings of modern public broadcasting, which is inadequately funded and has witnessed political interference.
Pratik Sinha,
The steps that WhatsApp has enlisted are not enough in terms of scale to address this problem in India. If it took partnerships with 24 media firms in Brazil, which has a population of slightly over 200 million and 97% of the population speaks in one language, then in India given the number of languages and the size of our population it will take atleast a 1,000 such partnerships to bring about any meaningful change here. Ideally, WhatsApp should have taken these steps a while back. Since this is an election year, we see a lot of platforms checking boxes and making changes to their privacy policies. WhatsApp is a global company but it must understand each country they are present in on a case to case basis and implement changes accordingly. India is low on digital literacy and has a history of mob justice.
The company needs to use tools that can detect the source of origin of the original video or photograph. They have not laid enough emphasis on decision making. Content going viral and the subsequent surge in traffic is good for business. WhatsApp needs to do more to help people find out whether a message is true or false thereby eliminating a large majority of misinformation.
Having said that, the government is shirking its responsibility by throwing WhatsApp under the bus. Yes, encryption makes it difficult for law enforcement agencies to find the bad actors but lynching is not a new issue. The government has not taken steps to run awareness programs to tackle the problem.