Dr. A J M Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan, Professor and Founder Chair, Dept. of Television, Film and Photography, University of Dhaka
Facebook and Twitter have turned into rumor mill s in Bangladesh. Compared to Twitter, Facebook is used more ominously. The liberals who think the online based media as technologies of freedom may find this statement offensive. But anyone living in the country can summon enough empirical evidence to prove my claim. The latest has been the rumors spread on F acebook related to the high school students’ movement demanding safe roads. Some women including an actress claimed on camera that four students were killed at Jigatola, Dhaka as a result of an attack jointly orchestrated by the police and the ruling party activists and many school girls were raped in the Dhanmondi office of the ruling party. They presented the information in frightened and shrilling voices to make people believe that they somehow escaped from the horror and were appealing to take measures to rescue other girls. Many people from different walks of life took it at face value and spread this on the social media. An online news portal, the Banglamail 71, ran a fake news that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made derogatory comments about the ongoing high school students’ movement in her speech at Jatiya Sangsad. The Prime Minister’s press wing notified us that it was a fake news: Neither the Prime Minister made any such comments nor the parliament was in session. Before the intervention of the press wing, many people read and shared this fake news on Facebook. The questions emerge: How and why the social media have been turned into rumor mills? What should be done to combat this?
There is an established notion that rumors originate when information is suppressed. This can happe n whe n the authority maintains absolute control over the gathering, processing, and dissemination of information. In the above cases, there was no restriction on the collection, process ing, and dissemination of information. In the age of multimedia, it is almost impossible for any authority to suppress the flow of information. Alongside the formal institutions of journalism, many private citizens can have access to information and have the ability to store, process , and disseminate them. Taking the advantage of digital technologies, two types of people run rumor mills. One type of people both generates and disseminates rumors while the other just disseminate that. The first group of people performs the acts with a clear motive. In the recent cases, the police claimed that the members of the Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student outfit of the largest Islamist party Jamat-e-Islami, concocted the rumors and disseminated them to rile up people against the government. The other group may be ambivalent in terms of the political goal but they disseminate the rumor because they accept it as true and want people and the authority to address this. Bangladesh leapfrogged to the information society from an agrarian society, resulting in a lopsided development. A small section of the society, who adopted the digital technologies with adequate skills , is overdeveloped while a huge section is underdeveloped. The latter section tacitly accepts and follows the lead of the former section. Dhaka is one of the cities where the number of Facebook users is very high. City dwellers access the Facebook on the computer and smartphone. Facebook with its interactive features have engrossed people, and its network ed nature is able to disseminate a message across the world in a mo ment. People express their feelings and opinions and get emotionally vindicated by their Facebook friends and followers through likes and comments. Friends’ support, the lure of publicity, and moral convict ions encourage people to express raw and unrefined feelings and political views. When these expressions seem threatening to the society and public peace, the state has to take measures to control them. How the state shall behave in this regard has been an imp ortant discourse in public life in recent days.
Three lines of actions are in discuss ion: One is curative while the others are preventive in nature. The law enforcement agencies try to cure the damage caused by rumors and fake news by arresting the people who posted these on Facebook. The preventive acti ons are: the law enforcement agencies shall monitor and filter social media contents, and the state shall prohibit the use of social media in Bangladesh. These preventive measures are in operation in countries like China, Cuba, and Iran. The first preventive measure may threaten people’s privacy while the second will deprive people of extracting the benefits of the social media. Individual awareness about what should be said, appreciated, and shared on the social media can work as the best preventive measure because the social media users are the problem, not the media. The intention of the user is key here; one can use them either for good or evil purposes. The users, who se expressions incite violence, defame other people, and spread rumors and fake news, must face legal actions for the sake of public peace. Local and global media and the politicians have to refrain from dubbing the legal actions against abusers of the social med ia as acts of suppressing freedom of expression. [The writer is a Professor of Television, Cinema, and Media Studies at the University of Dhaka and the Executive Director, Governance and Policy Research Foundation (GPRF).