Rajasthan: Cops monitor social media sites to check communal flare-ups

JAIPUR: Writing or forwarding messages that could disturb communal harmony can land one in trouble. Rajasthan police through its informers and men are maintaining a close watch on the social media platforms.
For monitoring such platforms, cops and their informers are joining as common man in the community centric groups where they act silently without getting into discussions or sending messages. In the past two years till August 2020, Rajasthan police managed to lodge 941 cases in which people had sent inflammatory or derogatory messages responsible for disturbing communal harmony. In more than 50% cases out of these, police filed charge-sheets.
TOI recently spoke to senior Rajasthan police officers to know how they are creeping into the social media platforms to keep a vigil on such activities.
“One can’t ignore the penetration of social media these days. It is of course responsible for flaring up a situation if we ignore the messages which are either rumour or are spreading hatred among communities. Hence, we are closely monitoring everything on social media especially on WhatsApp and other platforms. On almost every social media platform either we have our men as commoners or we have our informers join as members in these groups especially the community centric groups,” said ML Lather, Director General, Rajasthan police while talking to TOI.
Also, the Abhay Command Centre and other cyber cells have developed a software in which they just put some keywords and can scan the whole social media activities within Rajasthan on a particular day.