Living in the la-la land of rumours
Rumour is the new buzzword in Bangladesh's political lingo after it was thrust back into the limelight in October when students launched a nationwide movement for road safety. Since then, the government has launched a crusade against rumours, going to great lengths to monitor and suppress them.
So far, in line with its commitment to tackling rumours, it has passed at least one law (Digital Security Act), with harsh penalties for the offenders, launched a high-powered cybercrime unit equipped with a hundred police teams and modern surveillance tools such as open-source intelligence (OSINT), and has been reported to be considering a Tk 1.21 billion project for the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) to watch social media and messaging apps for four months before and after the upcoming election. Clearly, the spotlight is on social media—with Facebook, YouTube and Google poised to come under further control starting November.
These measures, draconian as they are, have naturally created panic and misgivings in the public mind but whether or not they are effective, or even necessary, requires deeper reflection.
The fact is, the concept of rumour is neither modern nor as straightforward as it is being made out to be. What is rumour? Generally speaking, it is the circulation of false or inaccurate information. It can be harmless, malicious or seditious, depending on your perspective. Historically, rumour has been a pressing public issue worldwide, connected intimately with the politics of governance, the construction of community, and notions of state stability. What's important is to recognise the complexities surrounding the formation and circulation of rumours, especially the kind of rumours that have surfaced in recent months, since a failure to do so risks generalisation—and even monopolisation—of rumours and precludes an objective study which the public deserve.
Can rumour be really suppressed? Although the government believes it can stem its flow through stringent measures, a study of the history of rumour suggests that it can survive in the most restrictive of environments. In fact, the more restrictive the environment, the greater the chances of a rumour being spread. In an article published in 2015, researchers David Coast and Jo Fox probed the psychology of rumour and showed that it exists because it satisfies a basic need. Rumour "states the desire for information" where official confirmation does not or cannot exist and often stiches together a narrative from sometimes unconnected events in an attempt at "collective problem-solving." In such cases, it is simply a means to explain the unexplained and is, thus, a "sense-making" activity for the public.
But the government's rumour detection and prevention strategy, which deems rumour inherently seditious, betrays a lack of understanding of the historical context of rumour, its diversity, and the very reason for its existence. The government has vowed to fight rumour but failed to specify what it means by it. The whole exercise suffers from vagueness and a lack of direction, and the absence of a legal definition/parameter makes it vulnerable to abuse.
Recall the rumours that were circulated during the student movement—attacks on the Awami League office in Jigatola, the death of a student inside the office, or the doctored photo of the body of a girl raped and killed in Tejgaon. The fact that a section of people believed these rumours symbolises a need in them to make sense of the rapidly escalating situation in which they thought anything was possible. The information was false but their apprehension was justified. Such apprehension is the lifeline of rumours.
However, instead of addressing people's concerns by encouraging the pursuit of truths to dispel rumour, the government took a regressive step by criminalising it altogether. Another point of concern that remains unaddressed is the blurring of distinctions between "misinformation" and "disinformation"—the first understood to be simply false and the second "deliberately" false. There is a big difference between the two situations: Can a deliberate circulation of false information be equated with an unintentional one? The government seems to think it can.
Equally worryingly, there is a tendency to equate "gossip", "speculation", and "early articulations of news" with rumour, although they differ significantly from each other and deserve to be treated as such.
Interestingly, Awami League seems to be advancing its rumour theory by putting itself in the box. It claims to be a victim of malicious rumour-mongering. Leaders of the party have openly promoted this theory, and accused the opposition BNP of being involved in what they called gujob santrash ("rumour terror"). One may argue that the victim card was Awami League's fail-safe in case the blame for spreading propaganda ever came back to it. After all, as David Coast and Jo Fox point out, it's often the governments that are directly or indirectly responsible for the spread of rumours: "Under both dictatorships and liberal democracies, rumour provided a check to state-orchestrated propaganda campaigns, serving as an important corrective to official narratives that the people did not consider credible."
However, a case can certainly be made that there should be safeguards against the power of rumours to disturb public order. Awami League may, rightly, say that it is only doing what governments throughout history have often done to monitor and suppress rumours, out of fear for such eventualities. Before the Internet, rumour was primarily transferred orally. But the emergence of modern communication tools, especially social media, has complicated the task of mapping the course of a rumour, posing a greater challenge than before and requiring greater policy attention.
But there is a stronger case to be made for a critical rethink of this argument: first, repressive measures to counter rumours are counterproductive because they arouse concern and suspicion instead of allaying them; second, such measures tend to violate people's right to free expression; third, rumour thrives in a climate of secrecy, in the absence of proper information, but the government is preventing free flow of information by increasing restrictions on the media; fourth, its inaction against rumours beneficial to its cause—such as that "BNP-Jamaat sponsored the student movement", or that "terrorists infiltrated the protesting students of a certain private university"—suggests the deeply political nature of its rumour prevention strategy; fifth, the vague, open-ended terms and shifting explanations being used to justify the measures are not very reassuring; and finally, such measures set dangerous precedents for the future with potentially far-reaching consequences.
On a similar note, as cultural critic Slavoj Zizek said about the growing control of digital media, "While in some cases (for instance, direct racist excesses) censorship is justified, it's dangerous when it just happens in a non-transparent way. Because the minimal democratic demand that should apply here is that such censorship be done in a transparent way, with public justification."
Bangladesh has yet to achieve a consensus on what constitutes a rumour, and how or to what degree spreading rumours qualifies as a crime—two basic questions that must be addressed before any rumour prevention policy is adopted. History has shown us that you cannot cut the supply of rumours without first eliminating the need for them. And the best way to do that is through the pursuit of truths and dissemination of proper information by a free, empowered media, not through stringent measures such as those adopted by the administration.
Badiuzzaman Bay is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star. Email: [email protected]
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