Bengaluru Violence Over Facebook Post

Table of Contents

What happened?

According to the police, A relative of MLA Akhanda Srinivas Murthy’s, Naveen,
Posted a communal and derogatory post on social media about Prophet Muhammad.
A mob of about 1,000 people reportedly attacked a Congress MLA’s house in Bengaluru’s Pulakeshi Nagar on Tuesday night and vandalised a police station.
Murthy’s house was vandalised and vehicles parked outside were damaged.
The crowd then attacked two police stations – KG Halli and DJ Halli – pelting stones at the police and even trying to burn them down, according to the New Indian Express, demanding that Naveen be arrested.
Several policemen were injured, the newspaper reported, and police opened fire at the crowd.
Three people were killed in the police firing and many injured.

Naveen has claimed that the post on his Facebook account was not by him, and his account had been hacked into.
He had been detained by the police for questioning.

The city police commissioner Kamal Pant has said that the police has also detained 149 people for rioting.
Curfew has been imposed in the Banaswadi police sub-division, and Section 144 reportedly imposed across the city.

The chief minister in a tweet condemned the violence and ordered action against elements who took the law in their hands.
Yediyurappa further added that the miscreants who attacked the police personnel, media and the general public will not be spared.
He also appealed for calm and asked people to not get incited.

Post-2012 period, where content circulating through internet-enabled mobile phones and on social media,
Has reconfigured the way in which the law, police, and civil society have grappled with this issue.
In August 2012, the circulation of threatening SMSs and MMSs in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai and other cities with a sizeable population of persons from the North East,
Was one of the first incidents where the configuration involving dangerous speech, social media and public disorder became visible
In 2014, violence took place using the pretext of morphed images, including those of Shivaji and the late leader of the Shiv Sena Bal Thackeray, on social media.

In March 2016, the Pune police inaugurated a Social Media Monitoring Laboratory.
It is meant to monitor ”unlawful activity” on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The lab would have 18 police personnel working in shifts round the clock to identify hate speech and take prompt action before complaints are received from the public.
The Pune social media monitoring laboratory is modeled on existing social media labs in Mumbai and in Uttar Pradesh at Meerut and Lucknow.
The Mumbai Social Media Lab (MSML) was set up in 2013 in collaboration with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), and Reliance