Today in Hinduphobia December 17, 2019: Facebook’s “Fake News” Filter Gets its Facts Outrageously Wrong

The Aligarh Muslim University “fact check” is being used to suppress viewing and discussion of another university protest where students chanted what sounds like “Freedom from Hindus.”

I was somewhat startled to see this strange image I had never seen before on my Facebook feed today:

A friend had shared a video clip about street protests in New Delhi where the protesters can be heard chanting slogans using the word “Azaadi” (Urdu for freedom and a popular Kashmiri protest slogan) from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and then — this is the crux of the controversy — from either “Hindu people” or from “Hindutva” (a word that academic experts and activists insist means fascism but is also often used by Indian language speakers to suggest merely“being Hindu”).

In either case, what is interesting here is that Facebook’s gatekeepers decided to censor this video clip and any discussion about whether the protestors were actually shouting against a whole religion and not just a political position, by asserting that a fact-checker had already found this claim (that the protestors had said “Hinduon” or “Hindu people”) to be false.

Facebook blocks and discredits this share relying on a partisan website — and a total factual obfuscation. The Quint “Fact-check” is talking about “AMU students” as you an see, whereas the video shared by Tarek Fatah above is of Jamia Milia Islamia students.

Now here’s the thing. Even before we get into the Laurel or Yanny type debate on what the protestors said and whether they were being just civil dissenters or outright raving religious nuts and Hindu-haters, here’s one fact that the Facebook fact-check apparatus got totally wrong: the fact-check article they link to is talking about a controversy over what the protestors said at a completely different city altogether! The video clip shared by my friend (and thousands of others) censored by Facebook is of students protesting in Delhi. The video clip that was supposedly found to be the subject of “fake news” according to Facebook is of students in Aligarh. (You can watch the Delhi clip on this page here; the author believes the word was “Hinduon” and not “Hindutva” but you can decide for yourself)

There have been controversies in the past about who said what in the audio tracks of student protests. It may be the case (though it doesn’t quite sound that way to me when I listen to it) that the Delhi clip contains slogans saying they are only against “Hindutva” (which is commonly acceptable at least in academic circles) and not against “Hinduon” or Hindus as a whole (which academics and activists still seem to agree at least superficially would constitute outright hate). But before we debate whether we should be viewing these protests as fair and truthful responses to a government policy or just hateful fundamentalist intolerance for a whole religion using the policy as an excuse for violence and intimidation (there have been several attacks on passenger buses and trains around the country), we should ask ourselves the key question about the highly intrusive nature of the censorship Facebook is deploying over here: Can we depend on Facebook to really decide for us what is “fake news” and what isn’t considering how sloppy, deluded, and perhaps dishonest it has proven to be already?

I think this is a very dangerous portent indeed, when the glimmer of hope that social media once offered for broadening the conversation in democracies and evading the gatekeeping citadels of big corporate one-way media is stuffed out like this. Why can’t people not watch, listen and decide for themselves whether something is indeed what it is supposed to be? While many people may share clips uncritically, there are also enough responsible citizens in the digital democracy who care about accuracy. To take away that freedom to watch, talk, and learn from each other defeats the promise of what the public sphere was supposed to be all about. And as this example shows us, it can have dangerous consequences for a community that has been at the receiving end of organized mass violence so many times now. The world continues to ignore the massacres and forced displacement of one group of “Hinduon” that took place as recently as 1990 in Kashmir.

The world continues to ignore even the heart of the painful reality the new Citizenship Amendment Act has tried to address in favor of outright propaganda that Indian Muslims are about to be stripped of citizenship and sent to camps (the legislation doesn’t affect existing citizens in India at all but only pertains to an expedited process for victims of religious persecution in three Islamic-states fleeing to India, victims who happen to be Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Christian, because these are the communities which are minorities in those these three countries). And now, thanks to Facebook, the murderous hatred that seems to be brewing in some parts of the protests are going to be ignored as well.

Unless Facebook gets its act together (and apologizing and retracting its suppression of this incident will be an essential first step), it is about to become complicit in a very ugly project of religious bigotry, suppression, and maybe worse. I choose my parallels with fascism carefully but I will say this. In today’s world, the equivalent of sticking a Star of David on a people marked for demonization seems to be this grotesque impulse to dismiss their fears of extinction as “fake news.” Hindus have been smeared incessantly in the global news media for the past few years, and our right to representation, our right to protest violence against us, haughtily ignored (and our concerns about Hinduphobia dismissed as a conspiracy theory or cop-out from self-critique).

An NPR reporter can tweet that Hindus must convert out of their cow-dung-worshipping religion and not even get NPR to apologize to the community. And now Facebook can take a dubious, partisan corporate media outlet’s claim of fake news from one city and stick it on to another. You don’t know what Hindus are being hit with today unless you know, and feel, a sense of pain and sorrow for all the poor Hindus who don’t have the economic security more privileged Hindus who often deny the very existence of anti-Hindu bigotry in the world do.

And for you to even begin to know, you will need to learn to stop and question the media, and to confront their growing complicity in mercenary propaganda campaigns against whole groups of human beings.

Media today are acting like a tool of war. The sooner we all recognize this the better off we will be, or at least, we will still be.