The right to protest is a cornerstone of any functioning democracy. It is a constitutional mechanism through which citizens, including students, can demand justice, accountability, and the protection of fundamental rights. Peaceful assembly and expression allow the governed to challenge institutional failures and insist that those in power respond. Yet, this democratic instrument becomes profoundly dangerous when it is mobilised on the basis of fake, unverified, or unreliable information. In such cases, legitimate grievance can mutate into collective hysteria, property destruction, physical injury, and the erosion of the very institutions that safeguard rights.Recent events at two major private universities in Punjab illustrate this peril with stark clarity.Within a span of roughly 27 hours and across campuses separated by about 140 km, student unrest recently erupted at Chitkara University near Rajpura and Lovely Professional University (LPU) in Phagwara. At Chitkara, unverified social media posts and messaging-app claims alleged that two female students had gone missing or died by suicide, accompanied by reports of screams and even paranormal activity. Students gathered, the situation turned chaotic, campus property was damaged, and police vehicles were vandalised. Authorities and medical officials found no evidence of deaths, suicides, or missing students. At LPU, a Reddit post and subsequent messages claimed that a female student in a girls’ hostel had been raped by an outsider days earlier, with some versions adding that she had later died by suicide. Hundreds and then thousands of students assembled. The protest escalated into widespread vandalism, arson, looting of campus shops, the prolonged blockade of National Highway NH-44, stone-pelting, attacks on police vehicles, and injuries to personnel. Classes were suspended for days, mid-term examinations postponed, and a Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed.'Slashed, Beaten, Head Split Open': Kolkata Film School Students on Mob AttackThese episodes are not isolated. They reveal a contemporary pattern: unverified information, amplified at digital speed, can transform constitutional protest into violence that destroys property, endangers lives, and leaves lasting scars on educational communities.The Decentred Circulation of Knowledge Philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault, who died in 1984 long before algorithms and social media platforms existed, never wrote about viral fake news. Yet, his core philosophical frameworks of regimes of truth, power/knowledge, counter-conduct, and the later emphasis on parrhesia offer a sharp diagnosis of precisely these dynamics.Foucault rejected the idea that truth exists as an objective, neutral reality floating free of power relations. He argued that every society produces “regimes of truth,” that is, the discourses, institutions, procedures, and practices that determine what counts as true, who is authorised to speak it, and with what effects. Truth is, therefore, entangled with power: “The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power.”In the digital present, this insight is acute. Social media and messaging platforms have radically decentred the production and circulation of knowledge. Institutional gatekeepers such as universities, police, courts, and established media no longer monopolise the authority to define events. Anyone with a phone can circulate a claim that rapidly acquires the force of truth within a closed network of peers.How Poor Journalism and Viral Rumours Turned Watermelons Into the EnemyFoucault’s archaeological method already noted how texts can replicate and the original author can fade. Today the effect is accelerated to near-instantaneity. A Reddit post or WhatsApp forward about an alleged rape or missing students does not require verification to generate real consequences. It produces a temporary regime of truth among the recipients: institutional cover-up is assumed, urgent collective action becomes a moral imperative, and dissent or caution is framed as complicity.Critics sometimes accuse Foucault of having prepared the ground for “alternative facts.” This misreads him. Foucault was an activist who valued rigorous inquiry and factual reporting. His concern was never to dissolve truth into relativism, but to examine the conditions under which certain statements become powerful, how they circulate, who benefits, and what bodies and institutions they act upon. In the Punjab campus cases, the unverified claims functioned exactly as such productive discourses. They did not merely describe a reality; they helped constitute one in which large numbers of students felt compelled to act, first in assembly and then in destruction.Why the Police Keep Choosing the State Over Their Own PeopleProtest as Counter-Conduct and the Battle over DiscourseFoucault’s famous analysis of the panopticon—a prison design in which inmates never know when they are being observed and therefore internalise discipline—has found a powerful contemporary analogue in algorithmic systems. Big Tech platforms harvest data, map biases, and deliver content that reinforces existing fears and solidarities. Users are not simply free agents; they are gently, continuously guided into echo chambers.The result is a form of invisible micromanagement of attention, emotion, and political orientation. Agency is not abolished, but it is channelled. When a claim about campus sexual violence or student deaths enters such a circuit, it is amplified among those already predisposed to distrust institutional narratives about safety, particularly the safety of women students. The platform does not invent the grievance; it intensifies its affective force and accelerates its mobilisation.Foucault understood power as relational and capillary rather than solely top-down. Wherever power is exercised, resistance appears. He analysed forms of “counter-conduct,” practices that refuse, deflect, or invert the directives of governmental power.Modern digitally organised protests can be read as contemporary counter-conduct. Social media temporarily flattens hierarchies of voice: students can bypass official university channels and traditional media, coordinate rapidly, and force issues of hostel safety and administrative accountability onto the public agenda.Yet, Foucault also insisted that “whoever decides what can be discussed is also in control of what can be known.” The struggle is, therefore, always a struggle over discourse. When the discourse itself rests on unverified claims, the resistance risks becoming self-undermining. In the LPU and Chitkara cases, the initial demand for transparency and safety was legitimate.The escalation into arson, highway blockade, and physical confrontation with police, however, shifted the terrain. The productive power of the rumour discourse generated effects that went far beyond the original grievance: damaged infrastructure, suspended education, injured personnel, and a climate of mutual suspicion. Violence here is not an external accident; it is the friction produced when a contested regime of truth collides with institutional attempts to reassert control.The Microphysics of Violence and Weaponised ClassificationIn Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced the historical shift from spectacular public executions to more dispersed, institutional forms of control. Power works through the classification of bodies, the management of populations, and the language that renders certain groups dangerous or disposable. Viral fake information operates within this microphysics. When a rumour classifies an “outsider” worker as a rapist, or an administration as a cover-up apparatus, it does more than spread falsehood. It produces a category of threat that can justify pre-emptive or punitive action. Real-world violence, including property destruction, clashes, and potential loss of life, then appears as the logical extension of that classification.Foucault’s political task was to criticise supposedly neutral institutions in order to expose the obscure forms of violence they exercise. Protests often become violent precisely at the moment when that hidden systemic violence is felt to be unmasked. Police responses such as lathi charges and heavy deployment reassert sovereign and disciplinary power; the resulting friction is predictable. Yet, when the triggering “truth” is itself fabricated or unverified, the entire cycle risks becoming a self-reinforcing catastrophe: rumour produces violence, violence produces further polarisation, and institutions respond with tighter control, which in turn fuels the next cycle of suspicion.From Jamui to Gurugram, Why Does Violence Need To 'Trend' Before the State Acts?The Possible Remedies Foucault did not “predict” social media. He did, however, equip us to see that the speed and decentralisation of contemporary information flows intensify the entanglement of power and knowledge. Unverified claims can trigger violence and material loss precisely because they function as productive discourses within existing relations of force, amplified by algorithmic infrastructures that reward affective intensity over verification. The loss of property at LPU and Chitkara, the injuries, the disrupted education, and the residual climate of fear are the concrete costs of a fractured regime of truth.The Foucauldian antidote lies in the concept he explored intensively in his final lectures: parrhesia, or fearless speech. Parrhesia is the courage to speak plain, uncomfortable truths from a position of relative powerlessness, accepting the personal risk that such speech entails. It is not the reckless circulation of rumour; it is the disciplined, ethical commitment to factual inquiry and frank utterance even when it challenges both institutional opacity and popular passion. Practical remedies follow from this orientation. First, institutional transparency must be strengthened. Universities and police need rapid, credible channels of communication that do not leave information vacuums for rumour to fill. Second, media literacy and critical habits of verification must be cultivated among students and citizens; the capacity to ask “Who is speaking? On what evidence? With what effects?” is itself a form of counter-power. Third, platforms that profit from engagement must be held to higher standards of friction against demonstrably false claims that endanger public safety, without sliding into crude censorship that itself becomes a new regime of truth. Fourth, the right to protest must be vigorously defended precisely so that it is not discredited by violence born of misinformation; peaceful, evidence-based demands retain moral and political force that arson and highway blockades forfeit.Foucault’s enduring contribution is not a set of readymade answers but a method of relentless questioning. Truth is never pure, yet the struggle to distinguish more from less reliable claims, to expose how power shapes knowledge, and to speak fearlessly remains indispensable. When unverified information is allowed to stand in for inquiry, constitutional protest can become its own undoing, destroying the property, the trust, and sometimes the lives it claims to defend. The democratic right to demand justice is precious; it is also fragile. Its preservation depends on the courage to ground that demand in something more durable than the viral claim of the moment.(Dr Harjeet Singh is an Assistant Professor (History), Lovely Professional University (LPU), Punjab. He writes on Sikh Empire, Historiography, Social, Philosophical and Cultural Issues. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)