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Social media misused by vested groups

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CIOL Writers
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If social media is used by vested groups for rumour-mongering and misinformation circulation during state crisis, the states are now working to skew the potent tool for their own benefit.

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In a volatile state like Jammu and Kashmir, security agencies are increasingly relying on social media feeds and posts to clamp down on dissemination of wrong and misleading reports.

“A silent mind is more dangerous than the one that speaks out. If they stop uploading, then how will we come to know what’s going on. We can track and take action against any profile – serious or fake – which we feel is offensive,” says a senior police officer in the state.

On April 7, hours after HizbulMujahideen militant Waseem Ahmad Malla was killed in Shopian, a Facebook profile by the name ‘EssEff’ with around 4,000 friends uploaded a photo of his body saying, “May Allah accept his shahadah”. The photo was ‘liked’ by around 1,100 netizens. Another profile of ‘MinnatUlLah’ put out a similar message with a picture of two bodies with the hashtag “#Kupwara_SHAHEED (InShaAllah)”, soon after three LeT militants were killed on April 21.

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The two profiles are full of content that supports armed rebellion against India and encourages people to join it. Photos of young Kashmiri militants with rifles adorn the ‘Walls’ of such profiles and the captions read “mujahids”.

There are thousands of such profiles and pages active today, says the police. Officers of the cyber crime police add that such activity is like a double-edged sword. While the percentage of “real” propaganda is quite less in the clutter, monitoring the “active accounts” often acts in the state’s favour as it allows them to keep a tab on the messages being circulated.

Though police have blocked many such accounts and registered cases against alleged operators in the past, but all it takes for a new account on Facebook is a new e-mail address. According to police investigations, many such profiles have been tracked to Pakistan and operators across the border often try to interact with “like-minded youth” in Kashmir for information on gun-battles in that youth’s locality or photos of militants killed there.

Social media experts say knowing that the content is highly “anti-national” and the cyber- crime branch constantly monitors the web, had the user been in India, he/she “would have been very scared to be at it”.

According to social media activist Pratik Sinha, who recently researched and blogged about such profiles, what makes the content on these accounts “unique” is that they are not available elsewhere on the internet. “This hints that such account operators have their private cache distributed using a different messaging mechanism,” he adds.

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