London: A study over the violent clashes that erupted in the UK's Leicester between Hindus and Muslims following the India-Pakistan cricket match, found social media being the one that fanned riots which ran over weeks.
A report published by Bloomberg News based on the study held by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University said that more than 500 fake accounts were found to be at work to spew scurrilous content through different social media networks during the riot.
Incendiary videos of mosques being torched, claims of kidnapping and memes of attacks and counter-attacks had widely been spread through social media, particularly through Twitter; most of the accounts were found to have had roots in India, the research suggested.
The BBC and disinformation research company Logically have also corroborated the Indian origins of most of these incendiary and provocative posts that fuelled the riots.
The rioters from both sides unleashed violent attacks at each other that saw people vandalising homes, cars and religious artefacts, raising religious chants.
Joel Finkelstein, the founder of the NCRI, said that both the domestic assailants and foreign actors were found using social media as a weapon in the instance of a riot or ethnic tensions.
The analytical study of the data collected from Google's YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc.'s Instagram, Twitter and ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok suggests how successful foreign influencers were in fanning tensions at the local level by spreading disinformation.
The research found the use of the word 'Hindu' exceeds the use of 'Muslim' by nearly 40% on social media and found most posts depict Hindus as aggressors and conspirators in a global project for international dominance. About 70 per cent of violent tweets were found to have been made against Hindus during the riot, the study said.
There were memes on Twitter that were being spread through now-banned Twitter accounts which depicted the Muslim community as insects, alleging that different aspects of Islam were "combining together to destroy India.
The research has also found the role of bot-like accounts that spread disseminated both anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim messaging, most of them are found to have originated from India that could be seen making tweets 500 times per minute.
Following the spread of the fake video of attacks in Leicester on Twitter, the research said, there could be seen pouring in tweets from India in an orchestrated manner, solely blaming Muslims for the violent events in the city, which in turn was found to be spurred more violence against Hindus in Leicester, the NCRI study said.