Bangladesh: Responsible use of Social Media could have prevented horrifying violence
Bangladesh’s technological landscape, with an internet penetration rate of 31.5 percent and 188 million mobile phone users, is also high in smartphone usage. The challenge is to manage this flow of information to prevent harmful consequences.
Hiren Pandit
Bangladesh is once again witnessing terrifying turmoil and mayhem. Having ruled the country for 15 consecutive years Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had to resign and has fled the country. Her son has announced that she will not make any more political comebacks. More than 500 Bangldeshis have died in this current violence, approximately 100 on Monday, 5th August, alone. The Army has taken charge and an interim government is to be announced shortly. This violence has been the Hasina government ‘s undoing, and to a large extent social media has helped fan this violence.
Misinformation and misleading information are not isolated issues; They also threaten the credibility of journalism worldwide. In Bangladesh, platforms like Facebook and Messenger are often responsible for spreading misinformation, frequently going viral. This urgent global challenge requires immediate and collaborative efforts from all sectors of society to combat misinformation and maintain objective standards of information dissemination on a broad scale. Abuse of social media platforms has become a catalyst for social, religious, political, and economic conflicts in Bangladesh. This misuse is causing significant damage, misinformation, and harmful issues that are being used to create tension and destroy the peace of society.
Social media is full of fraudulent elements to create political unrest. This is an essential challenge for building a peaceful and inclusive society. More careful and vigilant management by the government and law enforcement agencies is required to maintain peace and order. Social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, has become a breeding ground for illegal profits from misinformation about Bangladesh.
Eighty-four percent of internet users have a Facebook account, spreading thousands of misleading content daily. This creates a situation where a significant portion of the population cannot independently verify the accuracy of the information they encounter. A wide spread of misinformation has become a major social challenge. Historical examples of political and communal violence can be found in Bangladesh under the influence of misinformation. As the popularity and accessibility of social media increase, the fight against misinformation becomes more complex, posing a severe threat to the nation’s stability.
It involves understanding the various techniques employed to uncover the web of misinformation, including creating false links, misleading content, and fraudulent content. Bangladesh’s technological landscape, with an internet penetration rate of 31.5 percent and 188 million mobile phone users, is also high in smartphone usage. The challenge is to manage this flow of information to prevent harmful consequences. Verification challenges in the age of social media stem from the fact that anyone can be a news source, which complicates the verification process. Such hate speech is not a concern on Twitter or other social media sites like Meta.
Many people who oppose hate speech claim that there is a gap between commitment to social media policy and its implementation, particularly on Facebook, which plays a significant role in disinformation, discussion of conspiracy theories, and approval of inflammatory advertising. UN experts said that given the many complaints, META took the initiative to launch a vital mechanism like the Monitoring Board in 2020. It may take a long time to see the effectiveness of this board.
Today, the fundamental basis of human rights in Bangladesh, freedom of expression, is under threat due to the prevalence of misinformation. However, the youth can significantly combat this issue with their energy and fresh perspectives. Their meaningful participation is crucial to identifying processes and effectively addressing challenges. The aim is to empower the youth to play an active role against misinformation and to contribute to strengthening mechanisms to address these challenges locally and nationally. In the 2018 Safe Road movement and 2024 anti-quota student movement, rumors and misinformation, especially on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, played a significant role in the diabolic destructions. Addressing the incitement of racial hatred online requires continued commitment at the highest level by social media to review and revise their processes.
UN experts who made statements included the president and members of the UN Working Group on African Descent, Business, Transnational Corporations, and Human Rights. It is now a reality that social media has also gained immense popularity in our country and the contemporary world. On the one hand, it has excessive practical importance. On the other hand, the level of abuse is creating an unwanted wall of ugliness-doubt-fear in the entire society. At the crossroads of bad culture, false, baseless propaganda of politics-religion-economy-general social issues, communalism, misogyny, intolerance, violence, conflict, and division are becoming a great hindrance in the smooth movement of life.
Various negative statements about the identity of some personalities are creating anarchic situations. This social disharmony prolongs unbearable suffering in the lives of the masses. It is essential to analyze how the deviation of the creative-thinking-human-moral character of the young society under the cover of modern information technology will play a role in building a normal society in the future. There is no room for doubt that the beautiful woman will fall into the abyss of deep darkness if she fails to understand the different forms of social media dependency, which is taking a different form of the horrible reality that social communication dependency is taking away from the rich textbook- biographical knowledge and rational reading of world-renowned personalities.
In 2010, the famous British writer Howard Jacobson, who won the Booker Prize, expressed fear, “Facebook-Twitter will make children stupid in 20 years.” Children of the future generation will be illiterate due to the dominance of various social media, including Facebook and Twitter. With the use of smartphones and a large number of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, the communication method of the young generation is changing dramatically. And because of all this, they are losing the habit of reading books. According to criminologist experts, social media has recently become our daily companion. This medium is affecting our human qualities. Many are getting involved in crimes like money laundering, aggressive games, rape.
Many are mentally unstable. Due to its excessive use, the risk of various diseases, including anger-anger-depression-depression-loneliness-frustration-heart disease, is increasing. According to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is concerned about the misuse of social media, ‘social media is not for wasting time. It can be really beneficial if used properly. But if you sit here and digest whatever is shown, it won’t happen.’ Apart from making positive contributions, many of the expatriate and immigrant Bangladeshis are engaged in propaganda against the country. The image of Bangladesh is being questioned due to their constant presence and dissemination of anti-national offensive comments and speeches in various media, including social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok have fueled violence through rumors, misinformation, and misinformation.
Those with these institutions should think about the way out of this situation; if these social media are not helpful for the welfare of people, if your media is used to incite the destruction of people, country, and nation, then your accountability is also necessary. You have to ensure that people and society are not harmed by the mistakes and misinformation spread by your media; you cannot avoid the responsibility. Due to the various legal complexities of the countries where they are staying, it is often challenging to take action against them. The list of terrorists engaged in these heinous activities has already been sent to the respective Bangladesh missions. To bring them under the law of those countries, it is necessary to apply to the respective governments of the Bangladesh embassies.
According to sources published in the media, 70 percent of the world’s Internet users are connected to social media, of which almost 90 percent are young. Bangladesh’s most popular social media platforms are Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Skype, etc. 80 percent of internet users in Bangladesh have Facebook accounts, and many are teenagers. According to the survey results of various domestic and international organizations, a significant number of young men and women are suffering from deviant mental problems due to misuse of social media attention to study sports and busying themselves with electronic devices day and night. The extreme slippage is the education policy ethics.
Widespread conflict-violence. This social communication has been considered as a means of various dimension crimes including providing false information-hate-hate, sex and obscenity-defacement-currency and human trafficking-gambling-cyber violence. Due to the increase in crime on social media, many sites like YouTube and Facebook have taken steps to prevent the first appearance of content, including quickly removing unacceptable and harmful content in their own rules. YouTube and Facebook authorities regularly publish information to remove inappropriate content. According to the Google-owned video-sharing site, they removed 8.8 million videos, 3.3 million harmful channels, and 517 million unacceptable comments between July and September 2020.
Facebook authorities claim that they removed 30 million harmful content during the mentioned period, but the company alone can’t prevent it due to the abundance of unacceptable and dangerous content. Despite hundreds of efforts by regulatory companies, it is increasing at a massive rate daily. It has also been proposed that conditional registration from BTRC be obtained for every website, social media, and online entertainment platform operating in Bangladesh. One of the conditions is that any website and social media operating in the country must have its office in Bangladesh. NOC from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is mandatory for websites with news-curated content-film-web series.
Various countries worldwide are also trying to regulate social media based on legal frameworks. The German government enacted the NetzDG in 2018 to establish a system for social media companies to review complaints about objectionable content published on their sitesremove content within 24 hours of publicationupdate reports every six months on the companies’ performance, according to an analysis of media data. Disclosure is mandated. According to the Social Media Regulation Act 2021 in India, the Indian government can request Twitter and other media authorities to delete a user’s post and reveal the user’s identity.
Social media regulation laws were passed in Australia in 2019, with fines of up to 10 percent of companies’ global turnover and three years in prison for tech executives for posting hateful and violent content. Laws that took effect in November 2021 allow Russia to shut down global web connections in an emergency. Russia’s data law allows social media companies to store data about Russians only on internal servers in the country. The Government of Canada’s Social Media Regulation Act criminalizes child pornography, hate speech, and the publication of intimate images without consent, allowing police to take direct action against social platforms and those posting the speech.
The China Cyberspace Administration regularly shuts down various websites and removes harmful mobile apps, including gambling. Hundreds of thousands of cyber police in the country regularly monitor social media platforms and sensitive screen messages. Everything in the world has both positive and negative aspects. But what matters most is how we embrace and use the positive aspects of anything. Thanks to social media, a great medium of business has started. In this mechanized busy life, many people cannot go to shops and markets to buy their daily necessities. E-commerce has become a light of hope in their busy life. Social media is the survival method of various reputed business organizations or small businessmen to promote their salable products to buyers. To reap the benefits of this e-commerce, many unemployed youths are now turning to entrepreneurship.
As a result, many are now turning to online businesses and are seeing success. We need to accept that the excessive use of social media is causing adverse changes in our lives and creating a massive barrier to connecting with our family members, relatives, and friends. It’s best to sit up front and talk to anyone. However, our over-addiction to social media makes us more comfortable exchanging thoughts virtually. But the reality is that our dependence on technology constantly pushes us away from real life and makes us mechanical. Basically, according to the scriptures of every religion, the infiltration of distorted thoughts and ideas by axing at the roots of the traditional customs-sociology-truth-beautiful-welfare-pleasure-based culture-culture-tradition is facing a profound challenge to social media. Now is an excellent time to think about what the generation will get into the lie-deceit-fraud-incoherence equation.
The writer is a Dhaka-based essayist and research scholar.
