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I remember very clearly the mass hysteria caused by the a floating rumour regarding moviegoers at cinema halls unknowingly being injected with HIV-infected blood. Many different versions of the story spread like wildfire across various mediums that existed at the time, namely SMS and email. The version I heard went as follows: a PVR cinema employee was fired over a diagnosis of being HIV positive. The disgruntled man took out his frustration against the organisation by pricking himself with numerous pins and placing them facing upwards on the seats of the movie hall. People would sit down to watch the film and feel a poke, only to turn around and find a note that read ‘Welcome to my world of HIV.’
I recall my mother’s instructions to always look down before sitting in public areas following this story. Snopes, a website that fact checks urban legends, rumours and email forwards, many years later looked into this matter, and in detail tried to find the source of this story, debunking it as fictitious.
This is just one example of a multitude of baseless messages, emails, hoaxes and online posts that get sent forward, multiplying and mutating into misinformed articles that get shared by the hundreds on social media. These unverified, at times purposely misinformed propaganda posing as facts, is what in today’s post-truth era of Donald Trump is hailed by many as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts.’
India too has its fair share of fake news which we’ve seen pop up on numerous occasions in the recent past. The problem with our country not taking this as seriously as we should is how malicious the consequences of these can really get. We all saw how a video of a JNU protest was aired and referred to across multiple news outlets, which turned out to be doctored. As reported by The Quint, a final supplementary report by Truth Labs, an independent Forensic Science lab, found that two out of seven videos that were sent for forensic testing were tampered with, and that the slogan ‘Pakistan Zindabad,’ submitted as evidence in the case of sedition against Kanhaiya Kumar, was added on. “There is discontinuity in video and audio has been inserted from elsewhere. Whose voices have been inserted can also be determined if voice samples are provided to us,’’ KPC Gandhi, Chairman of Truth Labs told NDTV. “In the manipulated clips, videos have been edited and voices have been added,” he said. Unfortunately, it was only after a violent attack on students was carried out on the basis of the video, with them being tagged as seditious anti-nationals. The Delhi government reportedly took legal action against three television news channel, Zee News, NewsX and Times Now, that aired the video without verification. Yet, the tag has stuck on to many of the demonised students even today and continues to cause harm.
There exist countless Facebook pages and groups that post articles as news to unsuspecting users - it is true that many of them don’t know that they are writing about unverified stories that they may have picked up from somewhere else. But there are others who do it knowingly for the sake of virality and shares. One such group that Deepit Purkayastha publically called out for its lack of accuracy is the India Against Corruption page (TIAC). TIAC, in turn, posts a number of articles from a website called Postcard.news, which after scrolling through has a very clear bias, or may I say, agenda. The headline of one article refers to Mamata Banerjee as ‘Jihadi Didi’- a term that several ultra-nationalist, right wing groups use following Subramanian Swamy’s Facebook jab - and another states that the Delhi Police found evidence that missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmad has ties to ISIS and looked to join the terrorist group, when, in FACT, the police themselves came out and rubbished such claims stating they found no such evidence in his search history as has been alleged. The most misleading article perhaps published on their site is regarding a false survey by ‘BBC News Point’ that puts the Congress party as the fourth most corrupt political party in the world. BBC News Point is a site that can be said disseminates fake news on a number of occasions. It has no ties to the real BBC network, but piggybacks on a legitimate agency’s name in order to establish their own reliability. Another such ‘publication’ as Deepit Purkayastha points out is Telegraph Report - whose tag line ironically is ‘Truth Triumphs’ - which has no ties with The Telegraph.
The core issue here is the effect these articles have on readers and their mindsets as they are rapidly shared and re-shared through Whatsapp and personal groups. They end up furthering any regressive, aggressive and/or uninformed opinion people may hold.
The biggest culprit of misinformation and falsehoods in India has been cited as Whatsapp. A free, encrypted application where any user with a smartphone can post whatever they want without a filter, it is believed to be a source of many rumours that have eventually trickled into mainstream media outlets, as well as the primary distributor of fake news. One such recent incident is that of GPS chips being embedded in the new 2000 rupee notes that would allow the government to track illegal transactions, which was later even reported by Zee News. A fake video of the supposed tracking even surfaced, again through the messaging app. It got to a point where the Reserve Bank of India had to step in and publicly refute the story.
Whatsapp has over 160 million users in India (that’s more than Facebook, their parent company) according to a 2016 report by Mashable. Fake news has grown to be a major concern international with multiple websites existing primarily catering such misinformation, in India it seems that such stories are spread to private Whatsapp groups and personal networks, which on a number of occasion have grown to have incredibly harsh on-ground repercussions. “WhatsApp has become the most popular platform in India for sharing news — whether real or fake — because it is so easy to use,” stated Prabhakar Kumar, co-ordinator of CMS Medialab which monitors media trends in India in an article by Financial Times. “You don’t have to register or log in to use it. You simply have to have a smartphone and download the app.”
The ease of such usage has turned grim and ugly, even inciting violence in certain cases. In 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was killed by a mob in his village, in Uttar Pradesh, after images of him were shared on Whatsapp allegedly ‘proving’ he had slaughtered a cow - these images weren’t verified. It’s not just the violence we need to worry about but the nature in which it is moulding people’s mentality, especially those who have few alternative avenues of information.
Pranav Dixit aptly writes in his article of how the ‘nationalist wave’ that has swept our currently since the last elections of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister has used social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp to spread such hoaxes, false information, even photoshop failures in a couple of situations. The rise of Donald Trump has, in a certain way, strangely paralleled that of our Prime Minister. Like Trump, you either loved him or hated him, there was little space that existed in between. Following his campaigns for Prime Minister was a different kind of BJP campaign, one of sponsored online slander and abuse by internet trolls against journalists, opponents and basically anyone who would criticise Modi sarkar - this phenomenon has only grown in its seriousness, in terms of his ‘bhakts’ reactions and the consequences of voicing dissent, since the 2014 elections. In her book titled I Am A Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army, journalist Swati Chaturvedi explores this relationship between the organised online slandering and Modi-led BJP. “Everything changed,” author and Modi critic Rupa Gulab told Buzzfeed News. “The hoaxes that went viral a few years before were just silly, but with Modi and his fanatics, there’s been a sharp increase in the amount of WhatsApp forwards you receive that are just propaganda.”
The Hindutva agenda is only being seen as furthered by BJP’s latest selection of hardliner Yogi Adityanath, a man as polarising as Modi, as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Social media is meant to connect people, but when it is abused for propaganda and political purposes, it’s a problem that we need to immediately tackle. But one of the biggest obstacles is our path is the current polarized political climate and resultant narratives that prevail in India, and this is where fake news has created for itself a strong foothold. Two camps have been created - you’re either liberal or conservative. An author may lean Left or Right, but their biases should not, and cannot, seep into what is supposed to be an objective, fact-based report. You need to be able to trust the reporter, knowing that the content is neither driven by the ideologies of either Left or Right wing politics.
It’s not about being a Congress or BJP supporter - aligning with either is a matter of personal choice, but one that needs to be made with the correct information and not fallacies. But how do we shut this down? In a country as vast as ours, it’s quite a daunting task, one that mostly depends on each and every individual themselves. We can report such Facebook groups and posts. While Google and Facebook are working out their own method and algorithms to counter fake news, there is no law as such against such misinformation. As Richerdson Melchi states in this Quora thread, “There is no specific law as such to regulate the New Channels, but if you have valid proofs and evidence to file a case of “Fake” or “Paid” news, you call always reach out to NBSA (News Broadcasters Standard Authority).” But what about Whatsapp? Encryption of messages makes it hard to trace the origin of hate speech and false messages, and the police have come up with little to tackle this problem.
In the age of digital media, where rapid consumption of information is just a tap away, newspapers having slowly become redundant and fake news is more relevant now than ever before. With newspapers, you could still trust the individual reporters who were going out into the field, gathering facts directly from sources before writing up a piece. Today, at a time when copy-pasting information you come across and redistributing it is so simple, we assume all news is verified.
So what can you do?
Read the message/article. Read it again - read it out loud and be mindful. Does it sound real? Could it be true? Google it, ask someone else. Find other legitimate publications articles regarding the same. Verify it to a point that you are comfortable with it, before you forward on a lie that could in the future have tremendous, violent consequences.
Feature image credit: thestar.com
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