Nowadays, when accidents, epidemics, and other disasters occur, a second tragedy has begun to occur: disinformation.
Immediately after the accident, two falsehoods were spread. One is that there was a mosque near the accident site, and the other is that the stationmaster in question was a Muslim. In a variation on this theme, there was speculation that many Rohingya Muslims lived in Balasore.
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On June 3, the handle @randomsena of ‘The Random India’ tweeted a cropped drone image of the accident site with an arrow pointing to a corner with a vague structure resembling a minaret. The accompanying tweet read: Yesterday was Friday. ”
The handle only has 54,500 followers, but its tweets were viewed by at least 4.3 million people. As of this writing, the tweet had approximately 4,600 retweets and 14,600 likes. Below that, the same handle posted the following sentence: “FYI: Balasore is the epicenter of illegal Rohingya Muslims.” Both tweets were flagged by users for spreading hate.
A quick look at the handle reveals that the number of retweets and likes on the hateful post is vastly disproportionate to the number of followers it receives. Social media companies need to be able to identify such handles as sponsors of specific agendas.
However, Twitter, run by Elon Musk, did not delete the tweet. “The highlighted building is the Bahanaga ISKCON temple, which was identified by journalists at the crash site. It is not a mosque.” Twitter also posted on fact-checking website Alt, which discovered that the structure was an ISKCON temple. -Added a link to News.
The owner of the handle, Abhishek Singh, later deleted the tweet and claimed that the reference to Friday was because the Coromandel Express had previously derailed on Friday. But the damage has already been done. The tweets and photos were spread on platforms such as WhatsApp.
According to alt-news fact-checker Mohammed Zubair, train crash survivor Anubhav Das not only liked the tweet, but also “wrote a statement to news agency ANI about ‘possible sabotage'”. “I took it out,” he said.
Meanwhile, this sabotage angle was casually promoted by other handles including the so-called journalist @SureshCavhanke (“…terrorists have played Holi with blood before…”). Other users called it “railway terrorism” and “blatant sabotage.”
Several pages appeared on Facebook “innocently” asking whether the assistant station master’s name was “Sharif”. On June 5, one Bharat Babsar shared a photo of a man in a white uniform sitting on a railway instrument panel and tweeted, “…the station master’s name is Mohamed Sharif…” .
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The station master, Bahanagar, was identified as one SB Mohanty, and a fact-checking website found that the tweeted photo was actually from a 2004 blog about the Kottabarasa-Kirandur line.
As the number of handles spewing collective poison started to increase, the Odisha Police warned that “stern legal action will be initiated” against the rumor mongers. But the reality is that the disease is rampant in India, and there are enough people willing to buy the lie, yet not enough is being done to stop it from running bad.