In 2018 the national fondness for cyber-gossip collided with one of India’s deepest anxieties: child kidnapping
ne spring day in 2018 the police chief of an agricultural district in southern India was sitting in a routine meeting when one of her officers mentioned that the children on his patch were no longer playing in the streets in the evening. Villagers had also stopped sleeping outside at night, as they usually did in the warmer months. While the policeman recounted what he’d seen, another ten or so officers started nodding.
Rajeshwari was immediately suspicious. She had followed discussions about fake news and the American election in 2016, and wondered whether this was a misinformation campaign. The videos depicting people being dissected were almost too perfectly gruesome, right down to the bubbling intestines. The cricket scene also seemed staged: the boy stood passively beside the motorbike, as if waiting to be snatched.
India’s rural areas are fast catching up with its cities where technology is concerned. People used to sit around, play cards, smoke and chat with friends in the evening. Now you’re as likely to see them sitting on walls and plastic chairs, hunched over their phones. Many youths “hang around without doing any real work, top up mobile data and spend all day browsing the internet”, complained one man in Jogulamba Gadwal.
A few years earlier a story had circulated in Jogulamba Gadwal that children were being abducted and sacrificed at a nearby temple. Yet without the power of mobile messaging, the rumours faded away. There was no mass hysteria or violence.A key feature of WhatsApp is how easy it makes communicating with large groups. On an iPhone you can send messages to only around 25 people at once, whereas WhatsApp groups have up to 256 users.
A policeman tried to calm them down. With the help of a local man, he managed to get the four visitors back in the rickshaw, but the mob stopped the driver as he attempted to speed away and then dragged the men out. They doused the rickshaw in kerosene and set it alight.The villagers beat the men on and off for half an hour, until enough policemen arrived to pull them away. The victims were badly injured and were taken to hospital. For months afterwards they were afraid to collect alms.
The company did make extensive changes to combat misinformation. Before 2018 WhatsApp had put no limit on how many groups a message could be forwarded to at once. In July 2018 it introduced a cap in India, so you could send a message to only five chat-groups simultaneously . It removed a “quick forward” option next to messages with media content, and started tagging messages that had been forwarded from other chats.
In her 20s, after a brief and abusive marriage to a local man from Kerala, Rajeshwari moved to New Delhi with her infant son, where she found a job at a magazine designed for people preparing to join the civil service. She arrived speaking only Tamil and Malayalam, the local language in her home state, but she soon taught herself English, Hindi and Punjabi.
She also decided to set up a police theatre troupe of her own, and asked her subordinates to draft lyrics for a song about misinformation. Their composition was so vague that she ended up writing it herself. As the summer of 2018 progressed, the panic over child kidnapping subsided. There were no more serious incidents relating to WhatsApp in Rajeshwari’s district, though they continued elsewhere in the country.
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