Once captured by the ubiquitous social media lens and flashed everywhere, the evil that men do lives after them! In 2017, Shambhulal Regar etched his name into the social media’s “most watched” elite list by hacking to death and then setting on fire Afrazul Khan, a migrant labourer, for the unpardonable crime of being Muslim, even as Regar’s 14-year-old nephew filmed the horror and uploaded it for the world. For this act of vindicating “Hindu pride”, Regar, who is lodged in a Jodhpur jail, was honoured with a tableau during the Ram Navami celebrations in the city, a telling vignette of present-day perverse religious bigotry that is toasted on social media.

Then take the local hero of Gurugram, cow vigilante Monu Manesar, a social media celebrity with over two lakh subscribers on YouTube and 83,000 followers on Facebook and lionized for his videos persecuting Muslims who are alleged cow smugglers; the key suspect in the killing of two young Muslim men of Nuh earlier this year, yet roaming free.  Monu is reportedly the trigger for the communal rioting and mayhem that has resulted in six deaths and extensive damage to property of one community, by releasing a video that he would participate in the VHP ‘religious’ procession that provocatively passed through Nuh, a predominantly Muslim area.  A thought: would this ogre have been able to wreak such havoc without social media?

Lest Christians feel they have been spared such macabre social bashing, there is Manipur, where a communal civil war has festered for over three months. It was a mere blip in the national consciousness until the video of two Kuki Christian women stripped naked, publicly paraded and allegedly gang-raped went viral 79 days after the shameful incident in early May and forced the country to sit up and take notice. This was also when our mealy-mouthed Caesar broke his maun vrat to make a statement dripping with false equivalence that sought to diminish the enormity of the crime. Though still not revealed, the preponderant probability is that the video of the two women was recorded by a subscribing acolyte of the criminals as a memento to titillate fellow travellers – another brutal example of the perverse use of social media. 

By the most conservative estimates, over 4.5 billion people have descended the rabbit hole of the social media. It has become the prime source of information, misinformation, propaganda, psychopathic sadism and physical violence. The tech wizards who conjured, microchip by microchip, the awesome social media world, could not have imagined that they were, willy-nilly, creating the post-modern Frankenstein that threatens our world with its unbridled power.

The traditional media and their gatekeepers are still reeling from what has hit them. They have been seamlessly superseded by an ostensibly democratic and deadly effective communication web which enables anyone with a smartphone to have one’s message conveyed across the world in the blink of an eye. Regrettably, this marvel of hi-tech that is full of endless possibilities for social good, for disseminating knowledge, entertainment, values, has transmuted into a fearsome monster whose first target is the truth, the facts and sheer humaneness.

In the early years, social media gave hope of transforming the world for the better. A truly epochal information spreading tool, it promised a global society rooted in democracy, pluralism and a meaningful equality. Consider its positive forceful impact in a deeply racist country like America, where even as late as the 1990s, two professors bestowed respectability to racism with their egregious theory of “the Bell Curve” that sought to establish a genetic link between race and intelligence, clearly insinuating that whites were intellectually superior to blacks.

And yet in that benighted land a decade later, a black American with a Muslim middle name assumed charge as the Commander-in-Chief. In 2008, fuelled by a brilliantly innovative, multi-pronged social media campaign, Barack Hussein Obama became the first black President of the USA. His rousing rallying cry, “Yes, we can!” ricocheted around the internet along with his hope-filled message: “We will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea.” Social media had indubitably helped push back the racist bigots but, as it turned out, only fleetingly.

And who can forget the seminal role played by social media in the revolutionary movements for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012? Social media helped protesters to mobilise support, shape opinions, organise mass demonstrations and inform the world of what was happening in the autocracies of the region. In a dramatic reversal of roles, State propaganda was overwhelmed by a social media blitzkrieg that amplified the dissenting voices of the common citizens. Social media had struck a decisive blow for democracy by helping unseat an unsavoury gang of autocrats.

But these laudable exemplars of the potential of social media to democratize global discourse and promote the common good, proved deceptive and another false dawn. In the fractious arena of power politics, social media has become the prime means of communication in the fractured and chaotic media ecosystem, but that weighty responsibility has not been complemented by responsible behaviour. And the Tech companies -- the putative gatekeepers – have been cussedly reluctant to flag and remove inappropriate, offensive matter, largely because hate speech and incitement to violence is lucrative business. Ostensibly though, they maintain their positions as neutral platforms where people can freely express themselves.

Practicing an unrestrained free speech absolutism where the hitherto unsayable is now par for the course, social media is dominated by a bewildering mix of right-wing nationalists, nihilists, hatemongers, Islamophobic edge lords, twitterati warriors who have corroded the entire system with the most unspeakable, venomous and divisive rhetoric, creating a dystopian world where there are no moral codes and where every fact is negotiable. Social media platforms, largely unmoderated, have become cesspools of toxic behaviour.

It is frightening that social media has become for most users the sole fount of information and knowledge about the world around them. It gives them a false sense of power to avenge wrongs, punish enemies, while also providing them an outlet to vent their fears and insecurities. With its lethal arsenal of disinformation, alternative facts, violent trolling, doctored videos, odious propaganda et al, social media has seized absolute control in the “information war”, even as the traditional media outlets shrink rapidly.

In the USA, 300 newspapers closed in 2020 alone, the number of newspaper newsroom employees has dropped by 50 percent since 2008 and only 3 percent of US adults cite newspapers as their primary information source and another 20 percent access online editions. In India, according to the very dodgy NFHS data, in 2015-16 about 54 percent men were reading a newspaper at least once a week compared to just 32 percent in 2020-21. The measured, thought-provoking Op-eds have been supplanted by intellectually undemanding social media fare, a dumbing down that bodes ill for the future.

It is no accident that the weaponizing of the social media in the world’s two largest democracies coincided with the rise to power of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi – two leaders whose careers have been greatly influenced, if not defined, by their deep-rooted links with the social media. Trump is universally recognised as the leading troll in America. In July 2019, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections, he convened a “social media summit” in the White House, inviting a gaggle of pro-Trump titans of social media to strategize for the ensuing  Presidential elections. Social media constituted the main plank of his election strategy.

Not renowned for his fidelity to the truth, Narendra Modi’s version of the role of social media is a stunning example of two-facedness. His stated position is that “social media is reducing social barriers. It connects people on the strength of human values, not identities”, but the reality is that he is a Hindu supremacist whose camp followers have been persecuting Muslims and Christians amid electorally inspired outreach targeting Pasmanda Muslims and a section of compromised Christian clergy -- duplicitous gestures that fool nobody.

The PM is an unabashed social media buff. He has had his own personal website since 2005. The first BJP website was set up in 1995, but even before that, a group of RSS tech-savvy swayamsevaks of Tamil Nadu led by Ram Madhav, recognising the power of the Internet, conducted training programs in shakhas on the use of social media, not for the purpose of breaking social barriers and exclusionary identities by instilling human values, as claimed by Modi, but with the contrary intent of sowing a majoritarian religious exclusiveness and much worse.

In her book, “I am a Troll”, Swati Chaturvedi, arguably the bravest journalist in the country today, takes us into the dark recesses of the BJP’s social media world whose main purpose is to purvey fake news, foment hatred, pillory opponents, empower bigotry, incite violence and undermine democracy. Despite being the target of the most scurrilous attacks by right-wing trolls and facing sustained harassment by the government, she stood her ground, filing FIRs against her tormentors and what’s truly awesome, exposed their devilry to the world at large. She holds the PM responsible for emboldening them: “I’ve been watching in horrified fascination as the leader of the world’s largest democracy follows and felicitates trolls.”

We live in an age of viral politics where grass-roots support is driven primarily by the internet which is setting the agenda because of its omnipresence, unfiltered content, accessibility and power to create a fandom of mutual affirmation and instant feedback. The days when voters took their cues from the studied analyses of the political pundits are over as the vast majority turn to social media for determining their preferred choice.

India and I.N.D.I.A had better watch out! The 2024 General Elections will be fought under the aegis of social media, which now occupies a central place in our democracy. And it will not be a level playing field! As we head into the final lap of the election cycle, this dispensation’s troll armies will be going full tilt with their repertoire of dirty tricks – fake news, doctored videos, bigotry, polarising hate, incitement to violence. While they have a free run, the surveillance, harassment and curbs on free speech of opponents and critics of the regime will be intensified. It is a formidable challenge, but how the Opposition and the people who care for democracy respond to the machinations of this dangerous outfit will determine the future of  our democracy .  

(The writer is a former civil servant. Views are personal.)