A TechCrunch analysis on whether the same sort of panic can happen in US.
By Klint Finley
Last week tens of thousands of migrants from India’s northeast region fled urban areas
rumor ricocheted through text messages and social media that Muslims
would attack them after Ramadan. Fake photos added to the rumors
credibility.
The Indian government responded by imposing a five message limit on bulk text messaging, and now
The Times of India reports that India may crack down on Twitter if the company doesn’t comply with requests to remove “objectionable content.”
Given how
forward button happy we can be in the U.S., I can’t help but wonder if a similar panic could happen here. I spoke with
Shlok Vaidya, a former Department of Defense consultant turned entrepreneur in residence at the
Tech Ranch Austin incubator, about how this happened in India and what it would take for something like that to happen here.
How It Happened
SMS and social media were necessary but not sufficient conditions for
the event. Vaidya says there were a few requirements that enabled this
to happen.
First, the target of the hoax had to be a group people who are
marginalized and/or distrustful of the establishment and have little
institutional support. In this case, a minority group with a distinct
appearance (north-easterners look more East Asian than other Indians)
that hasn’t been well integrated into the mainstream of Indian society (
some in the northeast states have agitated for independence from India and integration with China).
Update:
Indian commenters on this post are claiming that that an integration
with China is not at all a mainstream opinion in the north east states. I
apologize for including the link, which is a translation of a
discussion on a Chinese message board, without doing more research on
the topic.
Second, the target group has to had to have access to the media that
the hoax was spread through. In this case, mobile phones and social
media were widely enough available to this group for the message to
spread quickly. Vaidya describes the ubiquity of cell phones in India
and other parts of the world as a unique moment in history, noting that
we’ve typically seen the spread of mobile phones and the web in
developing parts of the world as “empowering.” But Vaidya says
empowerment is neutral — individuals can use that power for negative
actions.
I would add that the hoax connected to fear that’s on fresh in
people’s minds. In the northeast state of Assam over 400,000 Bengali
Muslims, many of whom have been living in India for generations, are
living in camps after having their homes burned down
according to Reuters. Over 80 people have been killed. Muslims in Assam are being accused of being illegal immigrants, but
according to the BBC
many of these families have lived in India for generations. Given this
ongoing conflict, retaliation wasn’t implausible and even
north-easterners from states other than Assam
fled the cities, preferring to be safe rather than sorry.
Vaidya says that the Indian government’s response was inadequate and
too slow. Instead of responding immediately through the same media the
hoax was spreading the government sent police door to door and tried to
setup face to face meetings — but not until the rumors had already been
spreading for a day. By the time the government started limiting bulk
messaging and blocking websites, the damage had been done.
Censorship and regulation aren’t the answer, he says, but more people
are needed to provide legitimate information through new media. But
establishing credibility with marginalized groups is easier said than
done. The real issue is that these groups need to be better integrated
into society, and that’s been an ongoing problem for the region.
It’s still unclear who started the hoax in India, but according to
the Times of India the messages have been traced back to Pakistan by
Facebook and YouTube. If the hoax was propagated by Muslims, you might
be tempted to think it backfired by creating more sympathy for
north-easterners. On the other hand, I’d never read anything about the
conflict in Assam until the SMS story hit the front page of the New York
Times last weekend. And I doubt I’m the only one. The incident may end
up doing more harm than good for everyone involved, but if nothing else
it’s putting on the table issues that,
according to The Economist, have largely been ignored in India outside the northwestern states.
Could It Happen Here?
The dynamics of the panic in India are specific to those
circumstances. But something similar could happen here, given the right
conditions. “I fully expect someone to target a company like this one
day (to coerce a change in policy),”
John Robb, author of
Brave New War and a colleague of Vaidya, told me.
Vaidya mentions the activist group the
Yes Men and how easily they’ve been able to hijack corporate identities in the past. For example, in
2004 Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum was able to appear on the BBC World
claiming to be a spokesperson for Dow Chemical. Bichlbaum told views
that the company would dissolve Union Carbide, a company it owns, and
use the proceeds to pay restitution for the
Bhopal disaster, an industrial disaster caused by Union Carbide in 1984.
That shows how easily a corporate identity can be hijacked to spread a
message, but it didn’t have, for lack of a better term, virality that
the SMS panic in India had. The intention of this action wasn’t to
create a panic, and there was a “canonical” source of information, the
real Dow Chemical, to quickly dispel the hoax. But
the group achieved their goal of raising awareness of the issue and bringing it back into public discourse, however briefly.
Trying to think of something that fit the mold of what happened in
India, I asked Vaidya about the calls for Obama’s birth certificate in
the U.S. Those rumors are more difficult to debunk because the target
audience was already distrustful of the government and mainstream media,
and right wing institutions were either slow to distance themselves
from the demands and rumors or propagated them themselves. So even once
the birth certificate and a Hawaiian newspaper birth announcement were
made available, so-called “Birthers” weren’t convinced and claimed the
birth certificate was fake and/or called to see a long form birth
certificate.
Some Birthers will never be convinced, no matter what evidence is
produced. This is similar to the problem in India: no one could prove
conclusively that the northeasterners
weren’t in danger. Any attempt to engage with Birthers and conspiracy theorists, such as
such as Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration” proposal is likely to backfire and make them even more paranoid.
Vaidya says what the Birther movement and the India SMS hoax have in
common is that both will have longer term effects than a Yes Men hoax.
Tens of thousands of north-easterns are in the process of migrating. If
nothing else it will have lasting economics effects. It’s not clear to
me what effect the birth certificate controversy will have. I doubt many
Birthers would have voted for Obama anyway. But the meme is certainly
lodged in the minds of its target audience, and it certainly created a
distraction during the health care debates.
Pulling something like this off isn’t easy — otherwise those quit
Facebook day protests would have worked. The conditions have to be
right. The outcomes for the perpetrator are uncertain. But the costs
for trying are close to zero, so it’s inevitable that people will try to
replicate this eventually, whether to try to cause a run on a bank, a
race riot or some other purpose.
Photo by vagawi / CC
Source: Techcrunch
