Misinformation and Anti-minority Vigilantism: An Experiment in India & Pakistan

• In Event: Countering Misinformation in the Global South

Abstract

Acts of vigilante violence, most often targeted against religious and sectarian minorities, have become increasingly common in India and Pakistan in recent years. Journalistic accounts often link anti-minority vigilantism to misinformation on social media, leading politicians and activists to call on tech platforms to deal with such false information. Yet, empirically, the precise link between misinformation and support for vigilante violence remains largely unidentified. In this paper we fill this gap by asking what role, if any, misinformation plays in support for vigilantism. On the one hand, false information with a call to action could directly result in collective violence, especially in contexts where such information is readily believed. On the other hand, citizens could be motivated to engage in violence as a result of long-standing societal cleavages, with misinformation playing little to no causal role. To answer these questions we designed a jointly registered experiment in India and Pakistan using a novel audio medium treatment. We find that countering misinformation significantly reduces support for vigilantism, even amongst the most polarized subgroups of our sample. In addition, elite signaling and beliefs about state positionality do not move respondent beliefs. Our findings have key policy implications as they point to belief change as a potential way to curb collective violence even in highly polarized and tense contexts.

Authors

• Sumitra Badrinathan, American University

• Simon Chauchard, University Carlos 3 of Madrid

• Niloufer Siddiqui, SUNY, University at Albany