bengaluru tuesday nights violence in bengaluru is another grim reminder of how social media has become a platform to foment social discord there have been at least 23 communal flareups over the past three years in the state all triggered by social media postson august 9 a post on facebook by naveen nephew of congress mla akhanda sreenivasa murthy triggered a riot leading to the death of three people a few days previously a post with morphed pictures of prime minister narendra modi and union home minister amit shah by a teenager kept the davanagere administration scrambling to douse the furyon february 16 amulya leona who was arrested for raising offensive slogans wrote a facebook post in kannada which caused tension in different parts of the state in coastal districts of dakshina kannada udupi uttara kannada and malnad districts of kodagu chikkamagaluru and shivamogga hate messages are disturbingly commonsocial media platforms are being used to create instability in the state the it wings of major political parties are using digital platforms to spread hatred said a senior police officerhowever the state government has no effective mechanism to check this menace the major reason for violence in bengaluru which police officials admit is the inordinate delay in acting against hate messagesif the police had an effective system this could have been possibly prevented its a systemic failure of the intelligence gathering team as they didnt get to know the anger brewing among people in dj halli and kg halli another officer pointed outthe government has set up a cyber surveillance team to keep a check on such activities but its proving a daunting task to keep an eye on whatsapp groups twitter handles and facebook accountsevery month we receive at least 300 complaints of people uploading sensitive content we track users and try to find the origin and theres a dedicated team that delete such posts there are many whatsapp groups in which videos audios and images of rioting are circulated sadly we havent been to crack down on all of them said an officer in the cyber crime unit