Whatsapp became a must thing that should be there in one’s phone. Being an easy and effective medium of communication between faraway persons, it's an easy channel to caters the negativity and falsehood in the society. Such rumours and false messages are the causes due to which India have witnessed many crimes.
For such misuse and abuse of the social media platform, IT Ministry on Tuesday has sent a warning to the Whatsapp authorities to take needful steps to curb rumours due to which killing and lynching cases are getting occurred in the country.
On Wednesday, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked WhatsApp owners to work closely with India’s IT Ministry in order to retain their accountability, responsibility and vigilance so that nobody can misuse the widespread medium. The IT Minister stated: “India is emerging as a big digital power. Whatsapp has the biggest spread in India across the world just like Facebook and Twitter. While we completely welcome them in India's digital story and also making a commercial success of it, they must remain accountable, responsible and vigilant. It's their responsibility to ensure that nobody can misuse their platform,”. Further, he mentioned the actions that were taken by the officials of WhatsApp while saying “We found that disinformation and provocative messages on WhatsApp played a major role in instigating violence. The use, misuse and abuse of the platform which leads to the killing of innocent people clearly not acceptable. WhatsApp had submitted the Ministry's queries to its California office. Today we got a response from them ensuring that new features like the administrator of group controlling the messages can be useful in controlling the spread of rumours,”.
Notably, Facebook Inc., the owner of WhatsApp wrote to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology that stopping such activities of false messages is a great task which will need support of company, government and society.
Considering the rumors as a deep concern a note of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology stated: “The abuse of platform like WhatsApp for repeated circulation of such provocative content" is of deep concern to the Government of India. The ministry has taken note of these incidents as well as the circulation of provocative rumours being spread on the platforms,”.
Reportedly, WhatsApp’s higher authorities after getting aware of such violence in India due to such false messages are working upon the remedies that can lessen the ruckus that was created.
Notably, after watching the videos of child lifting, last week villagers from Maharashtra's Dhule have lynched five persons to death.
Before this, Tripura have also witnessed a similar case when a mob lynched a person to death and injured other two persons.
