Dear friends,
In my personal experience, it takes about 10-15 days for the gloss of a brand new year to wear off. (I guess I’m the optimistic type.)
But there are no holidays in the world of disinformation and extreme speech, because the merchants of reality manipulation are always at work.
Over the course of the new year, it turned out that unknown people had uploaded photos of more than a 100 Muslim women as for ‘sale’ in an app on the website Github. This app goes by the name of ‘Bulli Bai’.
The ‘Bulli Bai’ case comes more than 6 months after at least 80 Muslim women were put on ‘sale’ on ‘Sulli Deals’.
In both these cases, there was no actual sale, but the purpose of the act was to harass, bully and degrade the women.
At least four people have been arrested in the last few days, but since it is still very much a developing situation, there are unanswered questions.
Read BOOM’s coverage here.
From a Media Buddhi perspective however, we don’t necessarily need to worry about the facts of the case. Instead, we can start by learning to ask questions. Here are some. The answers to these questions in brackets below represent my views, which I believe are reasonable and sensible.
Was this act a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing or was there an element of pre-meditation involved? (Answer: the accused took publicly available photographs of women and put them up for ‘sale’ on Github, so yes, there was a fair bit of pre-meditation involved.)
Why did the accused do this? (Answer: we don’t know yet, but we can speculate intelligently. The dots are not so hard to connect.)
Can the actions of the accused be justified? (Answer: It was illegal, unethical, and immoral. However, that hasn’t stopped a bunch of people, newly identified as ‘trads’, from defending the actions and calling for more such attacks on people.)
Can the actions of the accused be rationalised away as acts by fringe players? (Answer: whoever did this doesn’t live in a bubble. If our society is radicalised, then it stands to reason that most people who have been driven to hatred of the other will do nothing and some will do the attacking.)
In that case, shouldn’t we look to reform society? (Answer: Yes.)
And so on.
A second exercise
Another exercise we can try from a media literacy perspective is to examine our feelings directly after reading a piece of news. Once we identify our feelings, we then assess for ourselves whether our feelings are creating a bias in how we respond to the news.
For example, take this year-ender report we did, Muslims Were Biggest Target Of Fake News In 2021: BOOM Study. Without clicking on the link, think about the headline and how it makes you feel. Then think about how these feelings informed your views.
Next step: click on the link and read the subtitle of the story which is, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the biggest individual target of mis/disformation last year.” (Screenshot below.)
Think again about your feelings. Next, read the article and think about your instinctive reaction to it. For those who don’t want to do so, here’s a quick summary of the piece, followed by another screenshot from the piece:
We examined 801 fact-checks from 2021 and categorised them according to the nature of the claims we debunked.
421 of our fact-checks related to politics (53%).
166 fact-checks debunked communal claims.
59 related to health misinformation.
As has been evident for several years now, research shows that we make up our minds based on our feelings. So in my view, any attempt to reform our informational ecosystem would have to take into account this tendency of ours.
Event alert: On Thursday 20th January, we are bringing together fact-checkers, researchers, technologists, policy folks and interested individuals for three conversations on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence with disinformation, extreme speech, and digital propaganda. The event is called AI x Disinformation and we are co-hosting it with the University of Munich (LMU Munich).
This is an online-only event. Here are registration details: https://lu.ma/AIxDisinformation
Wish you a great year from me and the team at BOOM!
Venkatesh