Social Media Backlash on Fake COVID-19 Tests: Corruption and Contentious Politics During the Ongoing Pandemic in Bangladesh

In early July 2020, Mohammed Shahed, an industrialist and the owner of Regent Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh with strong connections with the political establishment was implicated in a case of issuing fake COVID-19 tests. The incident sparked outrage on social media with users pointing out that Shahed was well connected with the political top brass. Government agencies such as the Anti-Corruption Commission promised action against these irregularities soon (Abdullah 2020). By the third week of July 2020, Shahed was intercepted and sent to prison, and the social media intensity on the topic had reduced. The relatively brief period of intense online activity could be the result of increasing draconian laws such as the Digital Security Act of 2018 which has seen rapid curtailment of civil liberties online. Al-Zaman (2020) noted that the government ordered public employees to refrain from sharing any social media posts that criticised the government’s handling of the pandemic. Following this, our first research question asks: which are the features that characterize the brief yet powerful social media outrage on fake COVID tests in Bangladesh? Here we focus on the potential of ‘digital sociality’ to explain such acts of resistance in contexts where collective action on highly contentious issues is dangerous. Borrowing from Postill and Pink (2012), we note that the focus cannot be on communities or cultures on the web but on qualities of social relationships which are shaped and re-shaped with the speed of activities happening in the online sphere. A second research question interrogates: How can we use digital sociality to explain the contentious politics that emerges from the case study? The primary data consists of 200 Facebook posts gathered in the first two weeks of July 2020 using the search terms #Shahed and #RegentHospital in Bengali; and five interviews with corruption and social media experts from Bangladesh. Respondents were identified through purposive sampling, and five of them accepted our invitation to speak on the matter. The relatively low number of posts on a trending topic can be understood through the lens of restrictions on social media posts critiquing the government. Following the logic of digital sociality which highlights the ephemeral nature of social media relationships and focuses on contextual fellowships, we propose to study this particular case of contentious political action in a repressed regime as an act of ‘resistance sociality’. In a quasi-authoritarian regime, stable networks of connected actors and activists are likely to be dismantled and prosecuted as it has been increasingly the case through systematic dismantling of Bangladesh’s civil society through legal instruments and punitive measures (Zamir 2014), but social media, and especially social media trends by virtue of their ephemeral nature, can provide a space for resistance for those individual voices who need not identify as part of a group and can remain anonymous when engaging in contentious action. We develop this conceptual category through thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun 2006) of primary data and propose it as a lens to interrogate similar occurrences in parallel settings.