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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Abstract
This paper examines how religious misinformation was disseminated on Facebook and affected it in the politically charged July-August 2024 Movement in Bangladesh. The study examines the use of communal framing, mislabeling of religious identity, and emotional visual materials as strategic means of sparking interreligious conflict on Facebook using a mixed-methods content analysis of 35 confirmed posts. Results indicate that misinformation posts that used communal narratives were used by 63 percent of the posts, and a distortion of religious identities was present in 57 percent of the posts, especially against the Hindu minority. Misinformation virality was also exacerbated by visual manipulation and ambiguity, particularly when the political protests were at their peak. This paper uses framing theory, social identity theory, and cognitive bias theories to contextualize the emotive and manipulative reactions to misinformation. It ends by concluding that the digital communalism facilitated by Facebook's algorithmic structure and the socio-political situation in Bangladesh makes a fruitful environment. The study provides policy, educational, and platform-based suggestions to reduce the collective detriments of religious misinformation and demands further research on the region and longitudinally to learn more about the changing trends in the digital misinformation ecosystem in South Asia.
Keywords: Religious misinformation, Communal framing, Identity manipulation, Facebook, Bangladesh, July-August Movement, Fact-checking social media content analysis
Author Biographies
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