Some Take to Scaremongering on Social Media

An image showing a high-rise with chipped plaster and cracked walls landed in the Facebook and WhatsApp accounts of apartment owners of Uniworld City, Rajarhat (Kolkata) a couple of hours after Saturday's earthquake. It appeared to be one of the buildings in their complex. Panic-stricken residents and outstation apartment owners began calling the maintenance officer, only to find out that nothing had been damaged barring an elevator door. The image was morphed. "These are malicious rumours being floated by people with vested interests," said Ranjit Chatterjee, the administrative officer.

Social media played an important role in relief and rescue operations during the floods in Uttarakhand in 2013 and Kashmir in 2014, and it is helping relief work in Nepal too, but closer home, its role has been dubious.

Like the Uniworld City flat owners, alumni of Isabella Thornton College in Lucknow were shocked to see WhatsApp images that claimed to be of the damage to their college. "I called up the college and teachers and found out that these were morphed images, the building had not been damaged," said Arpita Bhattacharjee, an alumni.

Clearly, mischief-makers have found in social media a great opportunity to spread panic.

In Bihar a WhatsApp forward which cited NASA to warn of "something bigger than the already experienced earthquakes" in the next 48 hours spread enough scare to force scores of people to spend the night at the Gandhi maidan in Patna. Chief minister Nitish Kumar, according to reports, flew back from Delhi when he heard of the panic and the matter came in Parliament on Monday with telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad telling the House that these rumours needed to be ignored.

"There is no way we can predict earthquakes in the short term," said KM Rao, senior scientist at the Institute of Seismological Research, Gandhinagar. "After a quake of 7.9 magnitude, there is unlikely to be another that is of even bigger scale."

"It's definitely a crisis," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society, referring to the misinformation. Abraham sees the phenomenon as a fallout of social media's "attention economy" where a significant number of people would do anything, put up intimate personal information or say outrageous things about something everyone is discussing, giving false data to get all the attention. "There is also the perverse logic that any attention is good attention; they get the same thrill as a stalker," Abraham added.