The Rumor That Emptied a Village
False rumors of child-abduction gangs, forwarded across WhatsApp, set off a wave of mob lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018. Public officials tied dozens of deaths to the messages, and the country's Supreme Court warned that “mobocracy” could not be allowed to become the norm.
The rumor arrived the way most did: as a message on a phone. Across India in 2017 and 2018, warnings that gangs of child abductors were roaming towns and villages spread on WhatsApp, often attached to graphic images and video clips that had nothing to do with any local crime. In place after place, crowds acted on the claims before anyone could check them.
Since May 2018, there were at least 16 lynchings resulting in 29 deaths in cases where public officials said mobs had been incited by misinformation on WhatsApp, BuzzFeed News reported. The spate had begun a year earlier; more than two dozen people had been beaten to death by mobs across India over suspicions of abduction since late April 2018 alone, Al Jazeera reported, citing killings across multiple states.
A rumor that traveled faster than the truth
WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, counts India as its largest market, with more than 200 million users, according to Al Jazeera. On the platform, a message can be passed from one group to the next in seconds, stripped of any trace of where it started. Doctored videos and old, unrelated footage were recirculated as fresh local warnings, and by the time a claim reached a village it often carried the weight of something many neighbors had already seen.
The victims were frequently outsiders — migrant workers, travelers, people simply unfamiliar to a suspicious crowd. In one widely reported case, a software engineer was beaten to death by a crowd of more than 2,000 people in the southern state of Karnataka, The Globe Post reported.
‘Mobocracy cannot be allowed to become a new norm’
On July 17, 2018, India's Supreme Court intervened. A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra declared that “horrendous acts of mobocracy cannot be allowed to become a new norm,” Al Jazeera reported. The court recommended that Parliament create a new penal provision to punish those responsible for mob violence, and it issued directions for preventive, punitive and remedial measures, The Wire reported.
The Indian government, meanwhile, pressed WhatsApp to act. It warned that the company “cannot evade accountability and responsibility” when its platform was used to spread violence-inducing messages, Al Jazeera reported, and cautioned that if the company remained a “mute spectator” it could face legal action, The Globe Post reported.
What the platform changed — and what it would not
WhatsApp responded with a mix of measures. It published advertisements in India's leading newspapers warning against fake news, offered a $50,000 grant for research into curbing misinformation, and said it was “horrified by these terrible acts of violence,” Al Jazeera reported. It also moved to limit forwarding — capping at five the number of chats a message could be sent to and removing the quick-forward button next to media messages, The Globe Post reported.
The company drew a line at the government's central demand: tracing who sent a message. Building “traceability” into WhatsApp, it said, “would undermine end-to-end encryption and the private nature of WhatsApp creating the potential for serious misuse,” adding that it would not weaken its privacy protections, according to BuzzFeed News. The tension it described — between the privacy of encrypted messaging and the speed with which a lie can travel through it — has recurred wherever viral rumor has met real-world violence.