Bangladesh Nationalist Party plays politics of disinformation: Report

Dhaka [Bangladesh], May 8 : Disinformation in the election is designed and promoted to intentionally cause problems for rival parties and it seems that Bangladesh Nationalist Party is engaging in such campaigns, Bangladesh Live News reported.

According to the Bangladesh Live News, BNP had hired trolls, bots, its leading politicians, highly partisan media outlets, and the mainstream media for playing roles in producing and amplifying disinformation in the modern media ecosystem.

It is pertinent to mention that disinformation in elections is distinguished from falsehood or libel in traditional media, as online content spread through social media cannot be regulated in the same way as it lacks journalistic standards and unchecked information is sent anonymously and quickly.

Bangladesh is fostering a fast-growing community of "netizens" with 66.94 million internet users at the start of 2023 when internet penetration stood at 38.9 per cent. Bangladesh was home to 44.70 million social media users in January 2023, equating to 26.0 per cent of the total population. These online denizens work as potential informants who use online media either to receive and diffuse or produce and disseminate information. For the previous few years, Bangladesh has been experiencing incidents of digital disinformation that are enabling serious communal disharmony, distrust, and even violence along religious lines.

For the 2024 election, Bangladesh is likely to increase the bots and actively produce pro-BNP content in the run-up to the elections, reported Bangladesh Live News.

For BNP, bots are especially useful as they can be engaged to create hate speech in political conversations, generally contributing to a climate of polarisation and enmity in online political discussions, undermining the developmental work of the Awami League.

Digital publishing has become a new tool as it reduced the cost of producing news, and as a result, a large number of new outlets have flourished. Youngsters also pay huge attention to the digital platform for being attractive and easy to read.

For instance the recent report of the France-based orgsation Reporters San Frontiers (RSF), recently showed Bangladesh's position below Afghstan in terms of media freedom. The index itself makes no sense but placing Bangladesh below Afghstan in terms of freedom is a deliberately planted story.

Reacting to this index Information and Broadcasting Minister Hasan Mahmud, 'This report is nothing but a purposeful story. Media freedom in Bangladesh is an example for developing countries in the world today. In many cases, media freedom in Bangladesh is more than that of many developed countries. He added that the fact that the RSF report has shown Bangladesh below Afghstan where girls cannot go to school and university, where no one can speak. This proves that this report is nothing but a deliberate story,' Bangladesh Live News reported.

Disinformation is not so much about lying, it is rather about creating doubts; magnifying secondary points and denying on this basis a whole narrative; distorting a context and - perhaps the most modern technique - disinformation in the name of 'the fight against Disinformation.'

The most glaring instance of such use of fake news in Bangladesh occurred when the media aligned with the out-of-power BNP and its long-term fundamentalist ally the Jamaat-e-Islami to successfully brand all free-thinking or secular bloggers as "atheists," as per the report in Bangladesh Live News.