Kolkata: Police in Kolkata identified and took down as many as 1.3 lakh “fake” or “misleading” social media posts about Covid-19 between 18 March and 18 May, ThePrint has learnt from senior officers of the force.
In the same period, West Bengal Police and their Kolkata counterparts lodged 270 cases and arrested 199 people for allegedly posting fake or misleading information about the coronavirus pandemic, an official statement from police said Sunday.
“We are witnessing almost a deluge of fake posts. We are talking to our counterparts in other states too, but it seems that this is specific to Bengal,” said a senior Kolkata police officer.
At least two dozen of these cases, ThePrint has learnt reliably, name central leaders of the BJP such as national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, Union minister Babul Supriyo, social media chief Amit Malviya and MPs Locket Chatterjee, Arjun Singh and Subhas Sarkar.
Many of these posts, the sources said, are communally provocative, and come as the state has already battled at least two episodes of alleged communal conflagration this month.
The state police’s crackdown on fake news has now become a subject of political mudslinging, with the ruling Trinamool Congress accusing the BJP of spreading fake news and the latter alleging that the state government is muffling free speech.
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‘Photoshopped images’
Since the Covid-19 pandemic started taking root, police in Bengal — especially Kolkata — has been on an aggressive drive against fake news.
In the week following Bengal’s first Covid-19 diagnosis, police in Kolkata took down 600 social media posts featuring rumours, including “home remedies” for the disease. However, police claim the nature of the posts has changed in the days since.
“Initially, we were only dealing with rumours. Those were related to allegations like unidentified Covid-19 cases, bodies being secretly buried, doctors wearing raincoats, cover-up of cases and so on,” the aforementioned police officer said. “However, now the character of such posts has changed. We are now being flooded with complaints of communal instigation. Some posts are being created just to create tension between communities,” the officer added.
The situation became “so bad after communal tension in Hooghly’s Bhadreswar earlier this month, that we had to suspend internet services in some specific subdivisions spread over three districts for five days”, the officer said.
A senior officer of West Bengal Police said the posts included “old, super-imposed and photoshopped” pictures from other states to show alleged “lockdown violations in Muslim-dominated areas”. “Some posts also include clips and videos of defiled temples or mosques to incite communal violence during the pandemic,” the officer added.
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Political mudslinging begins
Many of the cases filed for fake news name high-profile leaders of the BJP, which has been trying to make inroads in the state ahead of assembly polls scheduled for next year. Apart from the likes of Vijayvargiya and Supriyo etc, they include state BJP chief Dilip Ghosh and former Union minister Mukul Roy.
BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya admitted that leaders of the party had been booked for allegedly spreading fake news, but claimed their voices were being muffled.
“There were hundreds of cases slapped against us… At least 20 cases are against me, around 60 cases are against Arjun Singh and at least 50 FIRs against Mukul Roy,” he said. “The media is muffled here. We are trying to highlight the truth of Bengal and that is why they are filing cases against us,” he added, also seeking to “warn” police.
“We are making a list of senior police officers who are slapping false cases against opposition leaders. We will see how they work in such an unfair manner,” he said.
A senior Trinamool Congress minister, however, said Bengal was seeing “an avalanche of fake posts because the BJP has now pumped in obscene amounts of money in their IT cell to spread lies”. “They have no connection to people and that is why they keep spreading fakes,” the minister added.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has routinely accused the BJP of spreading fake news and “inciting riots” as the state government battles the pandemic. “I have instructed police to take stringent action against all such fake content. They are superimposing fake content onto screen grabs from news channels, newspapers too. This is horrible,” she said during a press conference last week.
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