Videos and posts, many of them misleading or false, about attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh have been getting shares from accounts on social media controlled by individuals on the far-right in the United Kingdom, the BBC reported.
After Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister and fled the country following mass protests on August 5, there have been reports of attacks on Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh.
However, BBC Verify previously found that while it was undeniable that there was violence against Hindus in the aftermath of the ouster of the Awami League government, fake news was also being spread with abandon on social media in India.
The BBC report mentioned Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a British far-right activist who has been criticised for making inflammatory posts during the recent UK riots, where far-right anti-immigration protests turned into racist attacks, arson, and looting following a stabbing in Southport on July 29 in which three children were killed.
Yaxley-Lennon uses the name Tommy Robinson on his X (formerly Twitter) account and has gotten involved in the situation in Bangladesh by sharing unverified videos of violence against Hindus along with dark warnings.
Robinson has posted, or shared posts by others about Bangladesh at least nine times since August 7. Most of the reposts are videos shared by Indian accounts on X.
The BBC said they have investigated one video shared by him which shows a woman pleading for her husband’s life as her home is attacked. The post falsely claims the property is being targeted by “Islamists”. The original video was shared on August 6, a day after the property had been attacked.
However, when the BBC investigated the story behind the video, they were told by a group of local students who had assisted the woman in defending her property that the dispute was about an entirely different matter. The BBC claim to have seen photos and videos of the clean-up which show the property as seen in the original video. The Hindu temple inside the property was unharmed, according to the report.
“The conflict is about ownership of land. A case was filed long ago,” a student told the BBC. A case has been in local courts about the ownership of the land for nearly six months.
BBC spoke to other people in the area who told them that the attack was not religiously motivated and that the perpetrators were a mix of Hindu and Muslim people. Locals also reported that other Hindu families and temples in the area were not affected.
Another video reposted by Tommy Robinson on August 7 shows a clip that went viral on July 17 in Bangladesh, that local media reported was of Bangladesh Chhatra League activists in Badrunnesa College being tied to a pillar by general students. However, the post Robinson shared featured a caption that referred to the plight of Yazidi women in the middle east under ISIS, and implied the same was happening in Bangladesh. Indian outlet PTI also made the same fact-check of this video.
The BBC report also mentioned several other social media posts that have been fact-checked by BBC Verify, including that of a supposed temple fire in Chattogram that was actually a fire set to an adjacent Awami League office, and the claim that cricketer Liton Das’s house was set on fire whereas the photos shared showed the house of Mashrafe Mortaza, an Awami League MP.
According to the BBC, accounts that were mostly geolocated to India drove this trend of sharing videos on social media about alleged attacks on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. They say that these posts have been shared by multiple accounts, many of which support Hindu-nationalist values.
