Can This Digital Wild West Be Controlled, And More Importantly, Should It Be?

With over 500 million users, it’s a frenetic arena: emergency help pleas and political debates jostle for space with cat videos, fake news and threats of violence. Can this digital Wild West be controlled, and more importantly, should it be?

- Prasanto K. Roy

At the peak of the second wave in 2021, hospitals overwhelmed by critical Covid patients began to run out of oxygen. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—already flooded with requests for ICU beds and drugs like Remdesivir, now saw pleas for oxygen. On the Mayday weekend, Reuters tracked 34,000 tweets about oxygen.

Social media is a busy space in India, where almost all internet access is via mobile phones. In fact, less than two per cent of India’s 1.19 billion telephone subscriptions are landlines. It’s increasingly common for people to use social media to ask for help, over WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

So amid that chaos of online oxygen pleas, thousands of ‘responders’ stepped in, tracking and verifying sources of oxygen, drugs, beds. They connected those asking for help to nonprofits, on-ground volunteers, suppliers, even those who had procured drugs and cylinders to save a family member, but were too late, and made those available for others. Organizations like Khalsa Aid stepped in with oxygen concentrator supplies and saw their social media timelines flooded with requests. In one of India’s worst crises ever, social media saved lives. It was possibly its finest moment in a long time.