On many occasions, it just takes a single incident to trigger riots. The incident can be actual, or overly exaggerated and, in some cases, entirely fictional. The event that sparked the beginning of the Arab Spring riots in Tunisia in 2010 was quite real. A desperate street vendor did actually set himself on fire after being humiliated by the police. This incident led to pent-up social, economic and political frustrations in Tunisian society coming to the surface as collective rage against the government.
However, on some occasions, news of actual incidents, as it travels, especially on social media, can mutate. Last July in Southport, England, a British-Rwandan teen stabbed to death three young girls. By the time the news of the attack hit social media sites, the murderer had been transformed into a “radical Muslim refugee.” The mutated telling of the incident sparked widespread riots that specifically targeted British-Muslims who had no involvement whatsoever in the stabbings.
Then, there is news that sparks outrage but is entirely fictional. In 2016, a man in Washington DC barged into a pizza place and fired three shots from an assault rifle. After the man was arrested, he told the police that he was “investigating” information he had come across on certain news websites, which claimed that the pizza joint was harbouring young children being abused by Democratic Party members. He insisted that the members were part of a sinister sex-trafficking ring.
Last week, students of some colleges in Lahore and Rawalpindi rioted as ‘news’ of a female student being ‘raped’ in a college basement spread. An inquiry by the Punjab government and investigation by most mainstream media outlets established........