It’s not the holier-than-thou PC attitude that makes us liberals cringe-worthy; it’s our habit of putting ourselves up on a pedestal and burying our head in a cloud of privilege and big words that truly earns us the wrath of the world.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters, for all the right reasons, have been called the students of ‘WhatsApp University’ — the gullible, blind-to-reason public that will buy everything they receive in their inboxes and are constantly ridiculed. But the same people, those who scoff at the ‘WhatsApp-types’, are falling prey to unverified information, and calling the President of India’s actions “embarrassing” without even doing a fact check.
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India’s Charlie Chaplin
The story goes that Charlie Chaplin once entered a look-alike competition and came third. All this is stuff of legend, but we saw something similar play out in front of our eyes today.
President Ram Nath Kovind had on 23 January unveiled a portrait of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on the freedom fighter’s 125th birth anniversary. Netaji has been in news of late, since all political parties are trying to appropriate his legacy ahead of the West Bengal assembly election.
President Kovind unveils the portrait of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at Rashtrapati Bhavan to commemorate his 125th birth anniversary celebrations. pic.twitter.com/Y3BnylwA8X
— President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) January 23, 2021
So when the leading liberals got their chance to criticise the President, who is also a former BJP member, they didn’t look left and they didn’t look right. A random person on Twitter claimed the portrait the President had unveiled was of Bengali actor Prosenjit Chatterjee from his 2019 film Gumnaami, and not of Netaji — everyone just went with it. I am sure nobody bothered to look up who Chatterjee is, what he looked like in the movie, or the poster of Gumnaami before calling out the President’s “embarrassing” and “hilarious” error.
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The confirmation bias
Confirmation bias hasn’t escaped our country’s brightest minds. It was on full display — nobody bothered to verify this piece of information because it gave them a quick serotonin rush, a tinge of happiness. After all, the liberals finally had the material to troll the Ram-Mandir donation-giving President. This wasn’t an opportunity to be missed.
Another confirmation bias of the liberals is their unwillingness to accept that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a popular leader. Despite multiple elections telling you the same thing, you won’t buy it and instead call it a media-manufactured narrative.
If we assume that this story was planted by the BJP IT cell for the liberals to pick up and make a joke of themselves, then they truly have succeeded.
But the confirmation bias problem doesn’t seem to be India-centric. Recently, something similar happened with Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Though she is a constant target of Right-wing trolls. A fabricated tweet, allegedly from the US politician, calling for the annihilation of conservatives went viral. The fake tweet read: “Let’s make Auschwitz look like a picnic”. That was enough for the conservatives in the US and around the world to jump guns. Why? Because deep in their hearts they always want her to say something demeaning. They’re waiting to take her down, and so anything radical coming from the ‘radical Leftist’ leader is appetizing to them.
The Right-wing too doesn’t consume news or believe in anything that doesn’t confirm their bias. They now question the authenticity of Arnab Goswami’s chats with Partho Das Gupta but wanted Rhea Chakraborty’s blood over the ‘same’ chats.
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The outrage
This isn’t the first time our Twitter celebrities have fallen prey to fake news, and it definitely won’t be the last. They will, however, continue to look down upon the masses who believe everything they receive on WhatsApp is Gospel truth. The manner in which we demean those vulnerable to fake news and propaganda while falling prey to the same from positions of power is simply deplorable.
It’s true fake news on WhatsApp is a serious concern, and the platform has turned into a propaganda machine. Such is the threat of fake forwards that WhatsApp had to take cognizance and craft an entire ad campaign cautioning users against trusting and spreading such unverified information.
But the elite usually ridicule the less educated, the not-so-woke — those who lack the means to differentiate between truth and lies, and are vulnerable to news that directly plays into their beliefs, biases and fears. But when the educated lot — with all the access to power and information — does the same, they somehow appear no different from those enrolled in ‘WhatsApp University’.
Views are personal.