By The Editor

It’s an interesting thing, the social media. People fall in love, break friendship, make new buddies, find jobs, loose jobs, get married, get divorce and very sadly as it happened few days ago in Pune, loose life over social media. Facebook, twitter, Instagram etc. connects us to celebrate our joys and express our anger. The big question is of the sensitivities that are associated to these outlets in our society. As long as the post is ok according to the social norm or public mood, it doesn’t matter what you put on your wall or timeline, as soon as it crosses the line, repercussions can be severe.

We are the world largest democracy but that doesn’t make us an open society. Even long before Facebook or twitter, there were instances of public outrage in our country against expressed freedom like M.F. Hussain, Taslima Nasrin or Salman Rushdie. The thing with social media is that anybody can make up anything and post it anywhere, which might lead to a protest, riot or property damage at a different place. There is no doubt that some of the content that’s being written on these sites is quiet obnoxious and offensive but at the end of the day not everybody thinks in same direction. Facebook, twitter has a ton of content that can be considered distasteful by many religious communities. Though most people tend to ignore these sorts of things but politics as it goes works in a different way.

What happened in Pune was totally deplorable; an innocent boy lost his life because of an ill-mannered post by an unknown individual. The actions of this group called Hindu Rashtra Sena just went too far. Had it not been the election fever mounting up in the state, the posts might have been overlooked but disturbing public harmony, fomenting anger or senseless killing is not the way to show disagreement.

Unlike west, we don’t have the sort of respective tolerance for a differing opinion and it’s a plain truth we never will, we are just not built that way but just a simple Facebook post is not worth this attention. We cannot police the internet or take down stuff that we don’t like but we can certainly choose to ignore. Even in regards to these derogatory posts, the police took action, tracked and took down the offensive content but we cannot silence everyone. The worst part is that those whose intentions are malicious clearly know that certain groups or people will get upset about such notorious antics and given the situation they will do it again, put more stuff online that might send blood boiling on the other side. Just think for a moment, people scared to go outside their homes, worried to go about their regular business or even fear for their life, just for a Facebook post, it’s simply not worth it.