Key Points
Misinformation, conspiracy, and hate speech are often perceived as a phenomenon of the social media age, but even before India came online en masse, enterprising groups like Sanatan Sanstha were working at the grassroots level to seed ethnically charged narratives, traveling from village to village with hard drives loaded with propaganda..
Nobody has tapped into this proliferation better than right-wing groups dedicated to fostering communal disharmony, moving from hard disks filled with videos and laptops in temples to the vast reach of YouTube and WhatsApp...
In the WhatsApp group, a conspiracy was plotted to spread violence, and fake and misleading posts targeting one community were shared, the police told reporters, saying that the group was also being used to instigate people to spread fake videos targeting Muslims...
While the Modi government was quick to force social media platforms to block clips of a controversial BBC documentary about Modis alleged involvement in intercommunal violence in 2002, there has been a proliferation of channels that broadcast extreme nationalist rhetoric because, human rights groups say, the polarization suits the BJP, which runs on a majoritarian, Hindu nationalist platform...
Right-wing groups have created a system of lateral surveillance, policing social media for posts that they can claim are offensive to Hindussometimes resulting in violence..
