On many occasions, it just takes a single incident to trigger riots. The incident can be actual, or overly exaggerated and, in some cases, entirely fictional. The event that sparked the beginning of the Arab Spring riots in Tunisia in 2010 was quite real. A desperate street vendor did actually set himself on fire after being humiliated by the police. This incident led to pent-up social, economic and political frustrations in Tunisian society coming to the surface as collective rage against the government.

However, on some occasions, news of actual incidents, as it travels, especially on social media, can mutate. Last July in Southport, England, a British-Rwandan teen stabbed to death three young girls. By the time the news of the attack hit social media sites, the murderer had been transformed into a “radical Muslim refugee.” The mutated telling of the incident sparked widespread riots that specifically targeted British-Muslims who had no involvement whatsoever in the stabbings. 

Then, there is news that sparks outrage but is entirely fictional. In 2016, a man in Washington DC barged into a pizza place and fired three shots from an assault rifle. After the man was arrested, he told the police that he was “investigating” information he had come across on certain news websites, which claimed that the pizza joint was harbouring young children being abused by Democratic Party members. He insisted that the members were part of a sinister sex-trafficking ring. 

Last week, students of some colleges in Lahore and Rawalpindi rioted as ‘news’ of a female student being ‘raped’ in a college basement spread. An inquiry by the Punjab government and investigation by most mainstream media outlets established that the story was fake. But this did not stop the students from rioting — even when the parents of the girl who was supposedly abused confirmed that she wasn’t.

In the age of fake news and its proliferation on social media, very serious societal issues can become trivialised by the unwarranted anger of ‘useful idiots’, who end up harming the cause more than helping it

Sometimes, facts are not enough to calm the outraged — especially those who are angered by a fictional incident that, for various reasons, they so want to believe in. When the pizza joint man was arrested, various far-right websites claimed that the ‘shoot-out’ was staged by the government to obscure the “ugly truth” about Democratic Party members.

Similarly, those egging the students on in Punjab through social media continued to insist that the Punjab government was trying to hide the rape incident through lies and other unsavoury tactics. But why do so many people refuse to accept even the starkest evidence that debunks what they believe in? 

It is much simpler to determine the emotional response of people who react to actual events. As mentioned, these events trigger pent-up frustrations that come to the surface in the form of collective rage. In 1967, a student was killed in Rawalpindi by the police. This was an actual event. The response to the killing snowballed into becoming an all-out movement against the Ayub Khan dictatorship. The regime had failed to address certain problematic outcomes of rapid industrialisation, population growth and urbanisation, leaving scores of young Pakistanis feeling ignored and frustrated.

If there is enough resentment in large sections of the society, then there will be unrest, even if it is instigated by false information. Anti-immigrant sentiments in various European countries have been on the rise, especially during the increasing electoral influence of populist far-right groups. So, rumours, fake news and false information about crimes and misdeeds of immigrants (especially refugees) are instantly lapped up as facts. These have also led to riots and violence despite being debunked. The prevailing resentment against (mostly non-white) immigrants in many segments greatly facilitates this. 

But unrest due to actual events has more potential to spread and gain sympathy than unrest triggered by fake incidents. The latter can cause damage and commotion on the streets, but it only rarely grows the legs or intent needed to be widely embraced. Once the primary source of the commotion is proven to be fake, the unrest begins to lose steam and sympathy. 

Mainstream media is an important player in all this. It plays a vital role by investigating claims of the government, as well as of the protesters, to objectively determine the authenticity of the source of the commotion. Various media outlets in Pakistan did just that before deeming the Lahore rape story as fake. But, unfortunately, some mainstream media outlets focused more on splashing images of the riots and on the number of rioters arrested. The fact that the rape incident was fake was buried somewhere in the small text. 

Many media outlets, both mainstream as well as those on the fringes, are heavily invested in highlighting narratives against the current government in Pakistan. But more disconcerting is the fact that some ‘credible’ media outlets ended up actually fanning unrest by over-blowing the commotion and undermining the falseness that was the source of the commotion. 

In 2004, the respected British daily The Guardian published a front-page story of Chinese police brutalising a dissident. But the story was entirely fake. According to the late British professor of journalism and author Brian McNair, the ‘story’ attracted the editors of The Guardian because it was about human rights violations in China. They got it from just a single source. It fit well with the newspaper’s image of being a progressive outlet. 

Angles and biases are expected from media outlets that are quite open about their leanings. But one is now noticing this in even the supposedly ‘objective’ media groups. For example, one can quite effortlessly pinpoint the tilted manner in which some of the most credible European and US media outlets are covering the so-called ‘war’ in Gaza. 

However, in many Asian countries, the more worrying bit is that elements that have become good at proliferating fake news to advance a political agenda seem to have sneaked into mainstream media. There, they find enough ‘useful idiots’ (especially among the younger lot) to aid them in their ‘noble’ causes. The truth is, there is nothing noble about any cause whatsoever if it requires falsehoods and lies to draw people’s attention.

Highlighting issues such as harassment against women, rape, misogyny etc, is indeed a meaningful and important deed. But these issues become trivialised when they are exploited to achieve cynical political motives. That’s what the students and their cheerleaders ended up doing in Lahore and Rawalpindi, even though most of them were nothing more than the usual gangs of useful idiots.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 27th, 2024