Hate in the Digital World
Asia News Agency
The culprits behind the hate apps - “Bulli Bai” and “Sulli Deals” - which “auctioned” several prominent and vocal Muslim women, implicate individuals born close to the turn of the century. At first glance, write Tarunima Prabhakar (researcher working at the intersection of technology, policy, and global development) and Prateek Waghre (researcher at The Takshashila Institution, where he studies India’s information ecosystem and the governance of digital communication networks) “this indicates that digital natives are not resilient against problems such as disinformation, hate speech and the potential for radicalisation that plague our informational spaces…….”
Effect of new media technologies
Prabhakar and Waghre argue this is the “effect of new media technologies developed over the last 20 years on our collective behaviour, and identities. Technologies have changed the scale and structure of human networks; and led to abundance and virality of information. Social scientists hypothesise that these rapid transitions are altering how individuals and groups influence each other within our social systems…..These identities can be shaped consciously or subconsciously by our interactions, and consequently affect how we process information and respond to events in digital and physical spaces.”
Can destabilise delicate social-political relations
The rise of social media has been “linked to the strengthening of personal social identities at the cost of increasing inter-group divisions. Some have suggested that personalised feeds in new media technologies trap us in ‘echo chambers’, reducing exposure to alternate views…….” The Indian context however, still needs a “better understanding of the broader psychosocial effects……Experience, though, suggests that when these beliefs are prejudices and resentment against a specific group of people, the feedback loops of social confirmation and validation can result in violence. Even pockets of disconnected actions, when repeated and widespread, can destabilise delicate social-political relations built over decades……..
“Actors as varied as bored students, local political aspirants, content creators/influencers, national-level politicians, or someone trying to gain clout, etc. engage throughout the information ecosystem. Their underlying motivations can range from the banal (FOMO, seeking entertainment, fame) to the sinister (organised, systematic and collaborative dissemination of propaganda, hate) to the performative (virtue signalling, projection of power, capability, expertise), and so on. The interactions of these disparate sets of actors and motivations result in a complex and unpredictable system, composed of multiple intersecting self-reinforcing and self-diminishing cycles, where untested interventions can have unanticipated and unintended consequences.”
Countering hate - ‘counterspeech’
The two authors suggest "individuals need to be stopped early in the path to radicalisation and extremist behaviour to prevent the development of apps such as Bulli Bai. This is where steps such as counterspeech — tactics to counter hate speech by presenting an alternative narrative — can play a role and need to be studied further in the Indian context…….”However, “when people have strong ideological dispositions, contending their narratives based on accuracy alone, can have limited effectiveness……”
