Social Media Outrage on Fake COVID-19 Tests: Corruption and Contentious politics during the ongoing Pandemic in Bangladesh

After the most prominent protest (the Shahbag Movement) of 2013 where social media played a crucial role in mobilisation, online platforms have become a prominent political public sphere in Bangladesh. In a post-Shahbag scenario, surveillance and suppression of social media users and the overall digital space has intensified. Although the number of social media users are increasing exponentially, the condition of democracy in Bangladesh is frail, and it is regarded by Freedom House as a hybrid regime (Freedom House 2019, 2020). However, at the same time, the power of social media, especially Facebook, to mobilise collective action cannot be denied in the Bangladesh context. This paper focuses on the case on the online mobilizations against regime’s deep-rooted corruption in the health sector in time of pandemic. The epidemic finally spurred the government to spend money on public health, however, mismanagement and incapacity to utilise the money optimally continue to plague the sector (Maswood 2020). One of the major cases of corruption that has already been investigated by the Anti-Corruption Commission of Bangladesh is the Regent Hospital scam. The hospital was deceiving and extorting money from the general people by providing them with Covid-19 certificates without conducting any tests. The Anti-Corruption Commission told the media that it will interrogate officials of the Ministry of Health and Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) to ascertain if they are involved in the irregular activities of Regent Hospital during the investigation. (Abdullah 2020). This case also gained a lot of traction online. Social media users and online activists were outraged and continued to write, comment, share, troll, create memes. Despite a close tie with the government, the owner of the hospital and his accomplice were brought to justice. Focusing on the case of the fake COVID tests, this article will unmask the contentious politics in social media during the pandemic. Using blended mode of social media ethnography and discourse analysis, this article will argue that linear interpretation of the role of internet is problematic and propose a dialogical framework to understand contentious politics in hybrid regimes.