Twitter is happy to permanently ban Alex Jones. But what about his Indian counterparts?
Twitter announced on September 6 that it was permanently banning conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media site Infowars from the platform, citing “Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behaviour policy, in addition to the accounts’ past violations.”
“We will continue to evaluate reports we receive regarding other accounts potentially associated with @realalexjones or @infowars and will take action if content that violates our rules is reported or if other accounts are utilized in an attempt to circumvent their ban, said Twitter.
For the uninitiated, Alex Jones is what is known in the corporate world as a “nut job”.
He’s a hugely popular conspiracy theorist, and horrifyingly still, he has a large un-ironic audience that likes to listen to him rant about either Satanists taking over America, or how Bill Gates is a eugenicist trying to wipe out minorities, or how the government is controlling the weather or how, amazingly enough, Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlour.
Yes. Alex Jones is a regular kook. But he’s also dangerous.
Jones, apart from spending a large amount of time making up garbage conspiracy theories, indulges in a whole lot of “fake news” peddling and hatemongering.
Twitter’s move here makes sense. There are consequences to what Jones does and people get hurt. Twitter, if not often enough, has done this good deed from time to time: getting rid of powerful men and women from their platform, so that damage to other users can be minimised. It removed Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News for his racist attacks on black women. It removed Tila Tequila for Nazi affiliations. It removed “Proud Boys”, a white nationalist group that indulges in hatemongering and violence.
But it can do more.
Especially in India.
Indian Twitter, right now in a state of extreme polarisation, is a quagmire of propaganda, hate speech, fake news and abuse. From anonymous handles to verified men and women, there is no end to abusive people on the website who use their large following and popularity to peddle not just abuse against those who are not aligned with their politics, but also to often spread communally-charged fake news. Repeat offenders, they should, ideally, be (politely) removed from the website to minimise damage, not just to those who use it, but to the nation as well.
Here's a little wish-list of people Twitter could train a tougher eye on:
1) Mahesh Hegde and Postcard News: Mahesh Vikram Hegde (@mvmeet on Twitter), who boasts of more than 70,000 followers — one is Prime Minister Narendra Modi — runs Postcard News, a website thats been a notorious fixture in the Hindu Right's propaganda ecosystem, that has been caught time and again running anti-Muslim, anti-liberal, anti-Congress, pro-BJP, pro-Hindutva, pro-Army, pro-Modi "news" — much of which apparently has no basis in fact.
In fact, in March, Hegde was arrested and taken into custody by Karnataka Police. He was booked under sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony), 295A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs), and 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy) of Indian Penal Code (IPC) for tweeting falsely about an incident that involved a Muslim youth "attacking" a Jain monk in Karnataka, a then poll-bound state in the eye of a political storm. In reality, the Jain monk, Mayank Sagar, was apparently involved in a minor accident — he was hit by a bike.
2) Madhu Kishwar: Madhu Purnima Kishwar is an academic, an activist and a writer. Madhu Purnima Kishwar is also a source of frequently fake news, which is weirdly always anti-Muslim, pro-Hindutva and hyper-nationalist. Sometimes, it is fairly innocuous images and texts, mostly the kind you would expect your 56-year-old majorly conservative uncle to send on the family WhatsApp group — “Indian water has been declared the wettest by UNESCO” and such. You can laugh it off and shake your head and, at most, wonder how someone can be so blissfully naïve.
But the more you see her tweets, the more you realise: this is deliberately done. When she steps up her game and starts spreading majoritarian statements, you can easily shrug her off as someone naïve. But for an author and academic of her repute, such presumptions don’t even stand. Back when hardliner nutcases from the Rajput Karni Sena were losing their collective minds over Padmavat, and some of them attacked a school bus full of children, Kishwar tweeted five random Muslim names as being the alleged attackers of the same school, without a shred of evidence to back it up.
Kishwar’s naïve-sounding hatemongering can endanger minorities. Does Twitter really want to wait and watch how far the envelope can be pushed?
3) Prashant Patel: Prashant Patel is a Delhi-based advocate, who loves going after people on Twitter. But his favourite pastime, of course, is peddling questionable statements. In July, Patel claimed in a tweet that “280 orphan minor girls were made pregnant in Teresa missionary and their babies sent abroad for trafficking,” during the time the Missionaries of Charity in Ranchi came under fire for allegedly selling babies to childless couples.
In 2017, when a Swiss tourist couple was physically assaulted at Fatehpur Sikri in UP, Patel was among those who spread misinformation that it was members of a minority community who had attacked the Swiss couple. Of course, the truth was far from that. The fact-checking website Alt-News has made a list of lies and fake news the man has spread, most of which are potentially dangerous in an age of rumour-based lynching. Why does this man still get to have a voice on Twitter? Only Jack Dorsey can explain.
These are but three extremely influential handles. There are many more.
Some do it in a nuanced manner. Some don’t. What is common to all of them is that they are aligned, politically, ideologically and sometimes personally, with the powers that be. What is also evident is that they all do not deserve a pulpit on a social media platform as their words have the power to actually hurt. But it would seem that Twitter only takes notice when problems get way out of hand. Hopefully, they won’t wait that long in India now.