![]() On 10 July 2018 – WhatsApp launched a newspaper advertising campaign warning against fake news and announced changes for Indian users of the platform that labels forwarded messages as such. On 4 July 2018 – WhatsApp offered $50,000 in funding for researchers to develop technological and social ideas that prevent the spread of fake news. Media coverage over the killings and efforts to debunk fake news have also been concentrated in the English and Hindi language media, with little attention given to local language reporting. The Indian Government does not track public lynchings and there are no official statistics from the Indian Crime Records Bureau regarding their occurrence across India. ![]() In at least some of the cases prime instigators have used child-abduction fears to stir up the violence and settle old scores. In some cases the mobs were composed largely of illiterate or poorly educated men that were unemployed or working as day labourers as well as being under the influence of alcohol at the time of the attack. The lynch mobs included men, women and children. The majority of the attacks have occurred deep within the interior regions of villages. In almost all of the lynching locations, no child abductions had been recorded in the previous three months. Fake messages customised with locally specific details are circulated along with real videos attached to fake messages or claims. The spate of lynchings commenced in May 2017 with the killing of seven men in Jharkhand, but did not become a matter of national attention until the beginning of the following year. ![]() The Indian WhatsApp lynchings are a spate of mob-related violence and killings following the spread of rumours, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the WhatsApp message service. Moral panic, mass hysteria, lynchings, mob violenceįake news spread via social media, especially WhatsApp
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