5/9/2020 FIGHTING ANOTHER

PANDEMIC: THE
TOXIC COCKTAIL OF
HATE SPEECH AND
MISINFORMATION
A Report on the Webinar

CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATE SPEECH / ೆ ೕಷದ ಾತುಗಳ ರುದ ಜ ಾಂ ೋಲನ

Find us @HateSpeechBeda: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube

Email id: ethicalmediacampaign@gmail.com; Blog: https://hatespeechbeda.wordpress.com/
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Contents
About Campaign Against Hate Speech ...................................................................................... 3
About the Webinar ..................................................................................................................... 4
About the Speakers ................................................................................................................... 5
Syeda Zainab Akbar .................................................................................................................. 6
Preethi Nagaraj .......................................................................................................................... 9
Siddharth Narrain ......................................................................................................................12
Questions and Answers ............................................................................................................16

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ABOUT CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATE SPEECH

Campaign Against Hate Speech is a collective comprising lawyers, researchers,

activists, students and professionals working to combat hate speech by sections of
media, public personalities and on social media. We believe an informed citizenry
that demands ethical journalism and responsible behaviour from its politicians is the
only real way forward to address hate speech and the structures of production of hate
speech.

While part of the group’s activities involved filing legal complaints with various
authorities against individuals and media companies that were actively promoting
hate speech, we have also been focussed on initiating conversations in both social
media and on ground. To this end, we have been continuously making both
informational and constructive posters and videos that offer fact-based, critical
perspectives on mainstream media reportage and current events. For instance, we
have also put out information to the public regarding mechanisms available to them
for reporting hate speech. It has also been involved in efforts to stop the spread of
misinformation by compiling and promoting news produced by various organisations
that offer factual information and not speculation or hate speech. It has been doing this
through its various social media and internet platforms. Further, it has been actively
reporting hate speech and fake news on social media to the companies who run these
platforms as well as expressing solidarity with victims of hate speech through
statements issued in their support.

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ABOUT THE WEBINAR

Campaign Against Hate Speech organised its first webinar titled ‘Fighting Another
Pandemic: The Toxic Cocktail of Misinformation and Hate Speech’ on 9 May 2020.
Through the webinar, we wanted to discuss how misinformation and hate speech gains
audiences in India and how law, social media companies and media regulatory
authorities are dealing (or not) with it.

Unfortunately, our webinar was attacked by miscreants who managed to post

offensive and hateful messages a few times during the course of the webinar. It is for
this reason that we cannot put the recording of the webinar for public viewing.
However, we wanted to provide our fellow supporters a sense of the rich conversation
we had during the webinar. Further, given that the webinar was organised as part of
initiating a public conversation around hate speech and misinformation, we hope this
summary report will act as a public resource.1

1 Speakers’ talks have been edited for clarity and readability.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Zainab Akbar is a social media researcher working on projects at the intersection of

technology and social impact. With training in Digital Humanities and social sciences,
Zainab works at the Microsoft Research Lab, Bangalore where she is investigating the
mechanics of misinformation at the level of third-party fact-checkers. She is working
on building an annotated digital repository of misinformation in India and has recently
published on researching temporal patterns in COVID19 misinformation in India.

Preethi Nagaraj is a writer, political analyst, and columnist. She has been associated
with The New Indian Express, Deccan Herald, CNBC TV 18, The Wire, and Hindustan
Times. A bilingual writer with proficiency in both English and Kannada, she is a
columnist with one of the oldest Kannada dailies - Prajavani. Preethi has been awarded
the Karnataka Sahitya Academy book prize for her narration of theatre person B
Jayashree’s biography. She is also a recipient of the Sarojini Naidu Prize – 2010,
conferred on her in New York for her reportage on the role of women in Panchayat
Raj.

Siddharth Narrain is a Ph.D. candidate and Scientia scholar at the faculty of law,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research is on the legal
regulation of hate speech online and incitement to violence in India with a specific
focus on Whatsapp and Facebook.

Moderator: Aiman Khan holds an M.A in Women's Studies from Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai. She has closely worked with feminist organizations in the country.
She is associated with Quill Foundation, Delhi as a researcher and activist. Her work
focuses on the intersection of gender, minority rights and mental health.

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Syeda Zainab Akbar

● In her talk, Zainab spoke of the research her team had undertaken regarding
the spread of misinformation. She pointed out that a substantial increase in the
spread of misinformation was noticed during the initial days of COVID-19 itself,
even before the Janata curfew was announced.
● While misinformation began as early as January 20, 2020, it began to see an
increase from around March 9 and reached a high-point by early April.
● Their research analysed 243 unique stories that were found between January
23rd and 12th April, 2020. These stories that formed part of their database were
primarily fake news/misinformation which had already been debunked by fact-
checking organizations.

On the nature of different categories of misinformation

 Messages around culture and casualty: Mostly visual imagery that

can cause fear and panic
 Messages around doctored statistics: Hyperlocal content,
descriptive and textual.

● Speaking of key characteristics that each piece of misinformation possessed,

Zainab pointed out that these characteristics had the effect of amplifying the
spread the misinformation. These characteristics include:
○ Novelty: Health-related misinformation has been widely shared; older
content is repurposed to present it new; culture and casualty related
misinformation are repurposed using visual imagery that can incite fear;
doctored statistics are more context-specific and are hyperlocal.
○ Mode of propagation: Videos (graphic oriented), texts (descriptive
data), images and audios are the main modes of propagation; culture and
casualty require more videos because they need to be more graphic;

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cure, government and doctored statistics related misinformation use

more text since they need more description.
● Sources of misinformation: There are two sources of misinformation: claimers
and attributers. The latter is more important since they are used to lend
credence or believability to any misinformation.
○ Four kinds of attributers: Politicians, Institution, Business,
Celebrity. Politicians and institutions are more likely to be used to
increase believability.
○ Claimers are public figures, politicians/government, news sources and
other social media users
● Every instance of misinformation is triggered by a certain event. Even though
Covid-19 is the larger event, there are events within it that have triggered
spurts of misinformation. The dataset between 14th March and 23rd March
focussed on police, death, lockdown, infection; the second period between 24th
March and 2nd April focussed again on lockdown and keywords included
Muslims, Religion, Doctors, Suffering etc; and the main keywords in third
period between 3rd April and 12th April were around Muslim, Religion, Modi,
Spitting, Food, Violence etc.

There are two sources of misinformation: claimers and attributers.

Claimers are those who actually spread the misinformation while
attributers are those who are considered authoritative on the subject
and are used to lend credence or believability to any misinformation.

● Misinformation is not always negative but also positive. There is an effort to set
agenda and form a narrative around the lockdown.
● Misinformation stories are affective and speak to people’s identities and
emotions.
● Even though the stories are debunked by the officials, people still tend to
believe in them. Emily Thorson has called this phenomenon ‘Belief Echoes’ in
her article ‘Belief Echoes: The Persistent Effects of Corrected Misinformation.’

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She defines belief echoes as: “actively misinformed continue to have persistent
attitudes even after misinformation has been effectively discredited”.
● Such belief echoes impact the effectiveness of fact-checking because fact
checkers cannot dislodge the underlying affective narrative of such messaging.
● But fact-checking allows us to create space for distrust, vulnerability and
scepticism on what to believe and not to believe. This connects up hate speech
with misinformation because when you don't know what you believe, you
generally tend to stick to your belief systems.

Even though the stories are debunked by the officials, people still tend
to believe in them. Emily Thorson has called this phenomenon ‘Belief
Echoes’ which she defines as: “actively misinformed continue to have
persistent attitudes even after misinformation has been effectively
discredited”.

● There is embedded hate in misinformation. Stories around prediction usually

had hate directed towards Chinese. In stories around speculation, there are
stories around lockdown being opened during Ramzan and how it can cause
the spread of corona.
● A vicious cycle of hate speech and misinformation occurs as misinformation
gives space for distrust and accommodates hate speech. But it does not exist
without hate already being there.
● Additional references: https://thewire.in/media/coronavirus-misinformation-
hate-fake-news

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Preethi Nagaraj

● I will talk about how media has amplified hate speech and misinformation in the
face of the pandemic.
● This hatred is a culmination of years of misinformation: small snippets here and
there which have worked on people’s prejudices, biases and hatred against a
particular community. The first hate news related to COVID was about a
Manipuri girl in Delhi who was spat on because she “looked Chinese”; she was
accused of bringing Covid into India. Such incidents tell us how the role of
government in the current pandemic and its mishandling is cleverly masked.
● The media hit a jackpot when the Tablighi Jamaat story broke out. There were
days together when TV channels ran this story blaming the mass breakout of
Covid on Tablighis. Programs. Kannada media especially ran segments on
‘Tablighi virus’. This took them to a point where they wanted to pin the blame
on a particular community; this has already been a fertile field of consistent
misinformation and hate campaign which we have seen even before 2014
election campaign.

This hatred is a culmination of years of misinformation: small snippets

here and there which have worked on people’s prejudices, biases and
hatred against a particular community.

● The misinformation around Covid should have been a wake-up call for the
media because the whatsapp messages around newspapers being a source of
the virus affected newspaper circulation. The media was becoming a casualty
of the misinformation which they had participated in themselves.
● In Mysore, there seemed to be a possible cluster was being formed in
Nanjangud with the Jubilant Generics that manufactured pharma products.
Most Covid patients in Mysore district were from in and around the area. The
Nanjangud cluster is also now being blamed on Tablighi Jamaat. The

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government had set up a committee to find out how this happened but the
factory authorities did not cooperate with the officer conducting the probe. The
minister in charge of the district was also replaced, strangely during a
pandemic. The new minister in-charge blamed it on the Tablighis because one
worker from the factory had attended it.
● Media has been very lax about fact-checking for a long time, especially on the
rise of misinformation around confirmed cases of Covid. It is the duty of the
fourth pillar to remain factual concerning the sources.
● A recent report by Reporters Without Borders says that India has gone down
by two notches in the press freedom index. The Central government says it is
going to work on ‘fixing’ this.

Media has been very lax about fact-checking for a long time, especially
on the rise of misinformation around confirmed cases of Covid. It is the
duty of the fourth pillar to remain factual concerning the sources.

● An article from former Prasar Bharathi chairman says that since this report
places India in a position worse than Burkina Faso, it is fudged data. This gets
publicity in prominent Kannada media, thereby causing a withdrawal of
(public) trust over such indexing mechanisms.
● Very few leading media houses run fact-checking sections; many are actually
propagators of misinformation themselves. Times of India, Dainik Jagran,
Malayalam Manorama, India Today, and The Hindu have fact-check desks. Alt
News, First Draft, Storyful and Google News Initiative are working on busting
fake news.
● The misinformation is being handed down by the establishment to the media
organizations. People usually have their favorite media that give them the
narratives that are suitable for their purposes.
● The only way to break the chain of fake and hate news and misinformation is to
go factual, but this is a humongous task.

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● So far, the brief to the media, to the fourth estate was that it has to be a
watchdog, it has to give factual news, it has to be a fact-checker. When factual
news is so mixed up with fake news, sometimes sounding more ‘fake-like’ than
fake news itself, then what does one do?
● Media should join hands with technology to put out factual news, and to counter
the spread of fake news. Media ethics needs to become essential. The mantra
of 5 W’s and 1H no longer seems to work, but this should change. Ethics have
gone awry with the advent of online media. Journalists should also work in their
individual capacities to rectify things.
● Additional resources: https://thewire.in/media/covid-19-kannada-electronic-
media-tablighi-jamaat

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Siddharth Narrain

● Within the legal framework in India, there are 3-4 types of laws that deal with
hate speech. Within the criminal provisions, 153A rules against promoting
enmity between two groups. (Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) deals
with the offense of promoting disharmony, enmity, or feelings of hatred
between different groups on the grounds of religion, race, place of birth,
residence, language, etc. and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of
harmony.)
● Also within the criminal provision, 295A rules against wounding religious
feelings. (Section 295A of the IPC is a variant of ‘blasphemy law’. It allows
punishing any deliberate and malicious acts that are intended to insult the
region or religious beliefs of a certain class of citizens.)
● Further, there are media-specific legislation, such as IT Act, 66A which rules
against hate speech in media. There are also specific rules and provisions in
the Cable TV Act.

You cannot equate all kinds of speech that targets communities

because communities themselves don’t exist in a vacuum. They are
subject to structural inequalities. Someone targeting a minority
community through hate speech has a different impact from the reverse

● Platforms like Facebook have community guidelines based on US laws. And

then there are rules-based on social reality and historic discrimination, like the
SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act which has provisions to deal with hate
speech.
● Language of the law in India differs slightly from international standards.
International standards use incitement to hate and hostility but in India, there is
a slightly broader conception and language.
● We’ll talk about some of the debates around the law and legal language. One
of the main critiques coming from critical legal scholars and feminist legal

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scholars is that all hate speech is not equal. You cannot equate all kinds of
speech that targets communities because communities themselves don’t exist
in a vaccuum. They are subject to structural inequalities. Someone targeting a
minority community through hate speech has a different impact from the
reverse. Section 153A does not recognize something of this sort nor do the
Facebook guidelines. But the SC/ST Prevention of atrocities act does recognize
this.

We need to look at who is the speaker of the hate speech, what kind of
influence does the speaker wield, who is it targeting, who is the
audience being spoken to, does the audience have other options for
their information, what is the context in terms of time, what is the
medium being used. All these factors determine how potent a particular
speech can be.

● We can also look at the specific factors that make some kinds of hate speech
more dangerous than others. Legal scholar Susan Benesch points out that we
need to look at who is the speaker of the hate speech, what kind of influence
does the speaker wield, who is it targeting, who is the audience being spoken
to, does the audience have other options for their information, what is the
context in terms of time, what is the medium being used. All these factors
determine how potent a particular speech can be. For example, someone
spouting hate speech on the street will have a different impact on us from say if
a teacher in a classroom were to be doing this.
● We should also catch dog whistles (speech which is not explicitly targeting a
community, but gives signals that one should). For example, Home Minister
Amit Shah comparing a community to termites, or the Tutsi community in
Rwanda genocide being called cockroaches. These are given as factual
statements but dog whistles are dehumanizing, and incite violence towards
particular communities.
● There are also instances where reverse messages are sent, where a dominant
or majority community claims they are persecuted. For example, when Sikhs

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were being massacred in 1984, but rumors were spread that Sikhs were going
to poison the water supply of Delhi and hence pose a threat to others.
● Many speeches that come out as statements or pure facts have an impact which
goes further than whether they are true or false. This is the relationship between
misinformation and hate speech. For example, in Apartheid South Africa,
boards were put up saying ‘no blacks allowed’ in restaurants and other public
places. This sign is not just a statement, but gives out a certain message that
there is a certain class of people that are sub-standard, thereby reinforcing
discrimination and dehumanization. Such messaging is difficult to detect but
they have an impact.

If there is speech that exists that make minority communities

uncomfortable to the extent that they cannot participate in society and
feel excluded—that impact on their dignity and their ability to participate
is enough for the law to intervene and act against the dehumanizing
speech.

● Philosopher Jeremy Waldren talks about a notion of dignity that is impacted by

hate speech. For example, billboards that went up in New York post 9/11 did
not talk specifically attack Muslims but they were Islamophobic. Waldren’s
argument is that even if there are no explicit statements asking someone to be
attacked, if there is speech that exists that make minority communities
uncomfortable to the extent that they cannot participate in society and feel
excluded—that impact on their dignity and their ability to participate is enough
for the law to intervene and act against the dehumanizing speech.
● Powerful institutions and individuals such as politicians, members of the ruling
party, celebrities as well as institutions of media should be held to a higher,
stricter standard; we can think about how to approach this legally.
● Virality is a mode of transmission. When things go viral, the nodes and hubs are
institutions and individuals who have a wide reach and create a massive impact.
If put together now in the way in which information flow—what we know now as

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virality—this has even greater impact. Civil society has to find ways to respond
to such matters.
● The problem with a purely legal, criminal-law approach to hate speech is: even
if you identify these actors and say they should be held criminally responsible,
in places like India, these existing laws are being used to target minority and
vulnerable communities; they are not being used to target people like the
powerful Delhi MLAs who spouted hate speech.
● Marin Luther King once said that the arc of law bends towards justice. In our
context, I would say the arc of law bends towards those who have the power to
bend it to their will.
● So how do we look outside of the law? Is there a way to make platforms and
media institutions accountable? Is there a way through initiatives like CAHS to
build a space critical of the government without allowing for more surveillance?
These are the open questions to be addressed.

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Questions and Answers

Q for Zainab and Preethi: How to break the chain of misinformation propaganda?
How to change the situation where perpetrators are not held accountable?
Suggestions for ways to check authenticity?

Zainab: We should stop forwarding hate speech and misinformation to break the
chain. There is not much research on successful methods to combat the spread of hate
and misinformation. Ideally one should fact-check every piece of news, but this is
tedious and not something everyone is inclined to do. One can follow fact-checkers
who are already doing this.

There should also be accountability, we should check our own biases. Ask yourself
the questions: Does the piece target a community? Is it click-bait-ey? Does it induce
fear and panic? If the answer is yes, then try to be ethical, and fact check before
sharing. One can distort the ecosystem a little bit this way.

Preethi: In the Padarayanpura or Tablighi incidents, parts of what were sent out as
fake news are actually factual. But as middle class, we refuse to see our own privileges
and hence feel entitled to our opinions that are demeaning of other people.
Individuals are combating this challenge, but it is important for this fight to now be
bolstered by data, ethics and the right kind of ideologies.

Q for Preethi: Are there any precedents for show-cause notices to TV channels as per
Cable TV Act 1995? Is it possible to do more of these notices? Would they work? Also,
how to counter people on our own social media? Are there positive reinforcement
mechanisms within the media itself?

There was a recent instance of Public TV going overboard on ‘helicopter money’

misinformation story. The central govt issued a notice to them that this was incorrect.

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However, only this program was addressed by the notice. The same channel was not
called out for the misinformation it was spreading against Tablighi Jamaat on most of
its other programs. The crux of the matter is on what the government chooses to
respond to.

It is the job of a journalist to report factually, without adding colour or biases. The
positive reinforcement for doing this is just that you get to keep your job and have a
reputation.

About engaging on one’s own social media, do not engage with people who provide
links from websites which are known to peddle fake and coloured news. Also, you
should not get bogged down, and think that you are doing your job when you get
threatened.

Q for Preethi: What is the backlash of hate news and threats, especially on women?

Hate news and misinformation has roots in patriarchal values. We need the tenacity to
hang in there and keep saying what we are saying; and work with integrity.

Q for Siddharth: Who is the author/ speaker for quotes on markers of dangerous
speech?
‘Dangerous speech project’ available online: https://dangerousspeech.org. Headed
by Prof. Susan Benesch.

Q for Siddharth: As advocates of free speech, we are aware of how any limitations on
free speech can be misused by the state. When is regulation of speech important? As
extreme examples, when speech dehumanizes like incitement to genocide, it is clear
that curb is important. Also, when does the state use sedition versus hate speech to
curb dissent?

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One way to address this is to subset and narrow down hate speech into dangerous
speech, as suggested by Benesch and others. The legal standard of what counts as
dangerous/ hate speech is very clear in international law. It is incitement to hatred,
hostility, discrimination and violence.

There are also international standards on proportionality. Depending on how grave

the offence is, there can be proportional measures. One complication is that speech
that is not directly inciting can add to the larger context of hostility and discrimination
which targets a community.

The British colonial law on sedition and hate speech was one section; it got split up
into two sections in the late 19th century. The part that talks about the relationship of
the citizen to the state and speech became known as sedition (now known as section
124A). Parts that dealt with the relationship between communities, between different
groups that became Section 153A. Both these laws get used to target dissent, while
they should be used in much more measured ways. There are very few actual
convictions on the sedition charges, but a lot of time and energy gets spent by the
accused parties in going through the legal process.

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