THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : The consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya has ignited communal passions as well and its reflections were felt in cyberspace. The technical intelligence wing of the state police on Monday flagged around 70 social media accounts for spreading communal vitriol. These accounts were found to be propagating communal hatred and the local police as well as the cyber division have been recommended to take action against the account holders, some of them residing in foreign countries.
A highly-placed source said that most of the comments that could affect communal harmony were found to be uploaded on Facebook. The accounts belonged both to the Hindus as well as the Muslims. According to the sources, the technical intel wing only focused on content that was created in Malayalam. Though a large number of provocative contents were found during the cyber patrolling, only those that breached the laws were picked up and forwarded for legal action.
“A huge number of social media accounts had posted provocative content. But since there is freedom of speech and expression, we only took notice of those accounts that violated laws of the land,” the source added.
“There were contents expressing happiness over the consecration of the temple. Similarly, another section of social media users expressed grief over the development. We took note of those accounts that deliberately targeted the other religion and carried contents that could create communal strife,” the sources added.
According to the intelligence wing, communally polarising content in Malayalam was mostly circulated via Facebook. However, such contents made in Hindi were abundantly found on micro-blogging platform X. Since, the police had decided to focus only on posts that were in Malayalam or made in Kerala, they decided not to act against communal content in other languages.
Many of the flagged handles were personal accounts, while some were social media pages. The cyber wing has been asked to trace down the real owners of such pages.
Row over holiday for school
Sree Gopalakrishna High School, Kudlu, declared a holiday on the occasion of consecration on Monday. Minister V Sivankutty has asked the director of public instruction to probe and submit a report