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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

That sounds terrifying. You have my sympathies. Could there be a better way, though? Some way to calm the mobs without silencing everyone else? In what way are the mobs using mobile Internet that requires shutting it down?

I hope order and safety are restored quickly, and in a judicious and democratic way. All the best from here in the US.

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Another Indian here (Currently living in the US). Unfortunately, whatsapp rumors have become a huge cause of concern in recent times.

"Forwarded messages" on whatsapp is an extremely common practice and a lot of times, false videos/news start trending which were originally sourced specifically to incite people.

There have been instances where I have had to explain my relatives to not worry about the forwarded message they got showing some disturbing images (because in reality, they were taken from the net from some war in a distant part of the world).

I am a huge proponent of Free speech but in those very tense moments in parts of the country, disrupting / stopping these false rumors from spreading can result in saving lives.

Is there a trusted source for verifying or refuting rumors, like a newspaper or TV channel, that could be promoted instead?

Yes, certainly. In fact the media is pretty active and usually reliable. They also help by letting people know to "Stop believing in rumors and stay calm". But I think the problem here is similar to that of older, non-tech savvy generation falling victims to Nigeriam mail scams. The thing in India is, a vast majority of the new mobile net users in India (majority belonging to lower income category) have been introduced to the internet very recently and hence are bad at judging what's spam and what's not.

So imagine an area which is already tense and then the local youth get forwarded messages with an Image (pulled from the internet) of a burnt body and then some poorly edited text at the bottom saying "This is what xyz community did to our brothers. We have to stand up to this!". That's when things go terribly wrong. Please note that this is just an example and that is definitely not what happened here in Gujarat this time, but it has occured a few times in the recent past (Muzaffarnagar riots) and so the government takes no chances.

But yes, I agree there has to be a better solution than just an outright disruption in services.

Instead of asking questions, why don't you come up with some solutions. You see, reasoning doesn't quite work well with mobs. It is good that the government resorted to cutting the communications rather than resorting to violence.

Why? I'm genuinely interested in this. If army opened fire and say 1000 people died, are Patels all over India going to go burn Army cantts?

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