Menace of fake news in India
John Thomas
India’s misinformation crisis: Fake or real?
Deconstructing the 'fake news' phenomenon in India, and how not to get fooled by the next annoying WhatsApp forward from your uncle
Earlier this week, in Bihar’s Chhapra district, as part of the recent demonetisation drive, income tax officials conducted raids on several doctors. One of them was Dr RB Sinha (65). The officials reportedly found unaccounted cash worth Rs 6 crore. The stress of losing all his hard earned cash caused him to suffer a cardiac arrest. He died. Tragic.
Except, it isn’t. Dr Sinha did not die. And I-T officials didn’t break down his door. None of this happened. Not a single word is true. But it was reported in local papers.
Fake news is by no means a new phenomenon, or a recent invention. But thanks to the rise of social media platforms, it is giving real news a run for its credibility. It has turned out to be scarily climactic in the demonetisation drive last week, during the US Presidential election before that, and during the Brexit referendum a few months earlier. The top 20 fake news stories outperformed real news at the end of the 2016 Presidential campaign.
To the heady mix of human psychology, partisan interests, and even malicious intent, if you add a bit of tech (read algorithms), you get a lethal weapon to sway public opinion. Since last week, several news stories have made their way into mainstream media, brazenly fake and loosely based on viral WhatsApp forwards. A Surat businessman, who allegedly surrendered Rs 6,000 crore. The news went viral on social platforms, only to be debunked later. Then, there’s the case of the fake Rs 2,000 note, found in Chikmangaluru in Karnataka, which made its way to Twitter thanks to a television journalist, only to be outed as a color photocopy of the original.
Before anyone could sniff it was misinformation, the fake news took a life of its own.
“What makes it difficult to control is that social media eliminates the barrier to entry, while at the same time eliminates quality control, so that untreated sewage ends up competing with purified water,” says a New Delhi-based journalist, a foreign national employed at a large international news organisation. “From there on, as it appears, it becomes about who shouts the loudest, trolls most aggressively and has the amplifier of a big media pipe.”
And, of course, the value migrates to the aggregators and away from the news outlets, who then join the race to the bottom because they can’t afford to back good reporting.
Anant Goenka, executive director of the Indian Express Group says, it is largely a platform issue. “I know Google is working on a trust project. Two years back, I spent some time with Richard Gingras, who is the head of Google News. I have learnt since then that some progress has been made. As long as we can do some kind of a verified sign on news sources, we’re back in the credibility business, rather than the commodity content business.”
Circulation of fake news, in the event of a big news cycle like the demonetisation campaign, Goenka adds, is inevitable. “There’s a lot of confusion, and rumours do come up every now and then, and inevitably make their way to news websites, but I still think that it’s largely a platform issue.”
Earlier this week, Google and Facebook, world’s two biggest such platforms facing criticism over how fake news on their distribution channels may have influenced the US elections, banned websites that peddle fake news.
Closer home, we have the WhatsApp forward menace where, as we understand, specific groups plant deliberate misinformation that masquerades as fact. And in some instances, like Sinha’s case, it reaches the mainstream. And how big is that number? A Pew Research Center survey in May revealed that a whopping 62% of Americans get their news via social media. While the number in India may not be that high yet, it is increasing by the day, given the ever-growing smartphone penetration which is now estimated to be between 250 to 300 million.
The threat of fake news is real.
The contagion
In India, those who fuel it are in consensus on the modus operandi: WhatsApp’s broadcast message service and its groups feature are increasingly used by political parties for propaganda purposes. They say WhatsApp is preferred because of its mass appeal.
“If there is one platform to reach the masses, it is WhatsApp,” says a New Delhi-based social media manager with a political party. The messenger app owned by Facebook, WhatsApp today has at least 160 million monthly active users in India, its highest global user base. “All parties use propaganda to reach out to their volunteers, who in turn distribute it through their groups. The power of WhatsApp is such that we can ensure a reach of at least 100,000 people within 10 minutes of the information being sent out.”
Propaganda aside, messages often range from a rumour to a data point, or even a made-up piece of information, often to confuse people. “For a successful message, we believe it must have three elements – distribution, content, and psychology. If one of these three elements don’t turn up well enough, the messaging is a failed attempt. Trust is key. You have to realise that a majority of our people are gullible enough to believe anything we tell them. That helps us use sentiments like emotion, pride, hurt in our messaging rather well,” the person quoted above added.
And importantly, as someone propagating the message, you have to believe in it, rather than believe it. “If we take the Rs 2,000 note as an example, the reason why it was forwarded multiple times was because people believed in it while having doubts. It also appealed to several possibilities – like the use of technology, because Narendra Modi is a tech-savvy prime minister.”
While political parties and their social media cells are one potential source of fake news, it need not be the case every single time. “Why just us? We often reach out to our volunteers and sympathisers. It could be anyone [from the larger population] making a witty or a provocative comment and it could still end up as fake information,” he added.
The Ken reached out to three WhatsApp and Facebook officials. One of them, who did not want to be identified, said, “There is no clear view on WhatsApp, besides what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in his post-election Facebook update.“
The motive
From seasoned journalists to corporate leaders, all tweeted the image of Rs 2,000 notes purported to be fitted with a “chip”, some being more specific and calling it “NGC” (Nano GPS Chip). It would make currency circulation traceable, was the logic. Multiple people across political parties we spoke to said that the “chip” story, of course fake, originated in WhatsApp groups operated by “overzealous supporters” of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The party, however, denies its role or that of its workers in this. “We would like to place it on record that that any rumour mongering, or mischief on social media platforms during the demonetisation drive has been done by political parties with vested interests, who have a lot to hide,” a BJP spokesperson told The Ken. “We will not hesitate to name the party concerned, and if anyone other than the Prime Minister has been using social media to propagate messages effectively, it is the Aam Aadmi Party.”
The routine political slugfest aside, what began on WhatsApp groups quickly spread to Twitter. Facebook news feeds were filled with the exact same information. And hours later, several YouTube explainers had already been uploaded.
But what followed next exposed the crisis. News outlets published stories, some even quoting anonymous high-level sources. The sheer power of (mis)information which travelled through multiple channels landed up at the Finance Minister’s doorstep when he was forced to clarify that it wasn’t the case. And when did shit get real? The moment an ‘influential’ editor of Zee News, broadcast a near two-minute monologue extolling the high-level, world-class technology that was apparently fitted into the Rs 2,000 note. Another Hindi channel, ABP News, spoke extensively about its features for nearly 10 minutes.
And then, there is source-level fakery, which is equally dangerous. On Sunday, news agency ANI posted a tweet, quoting a tea stall vendor as accepting digital wallet transactions for as little as Rs 7. While that might come across as a fantastic human story in these times, one of the customers interviewed by the agency, turned out to be its own employee. Soon, a backlash ensued on Twitter, and ANI on Tuesday, issued an apology.
The country’s largest circulating English daily was not far behind. The Times of India carried a story on the death of a 73-year-old man outside a Mumbai bank branch, with the headline “Senior Dies Outside Bank, Eatery Staff Beat Patrons”. Pretty legitimate, right? Except, the said branch in Navghar, Mulund, did not exist. The next day, the TOI regretted the error.
Crisis or opportunity?
The Editors’ Guild of India declined to comment on the fake news phenomenon.
But Goenka is looking at the problem in the eye: “As a provider of news, we need to have our bullshit indicator on at all times. It goes without saying. There has to be an emphasis on accuracy over speed. Verification, even if simple, must happen.”
The kind of soul searching Western media is engaging in – whether they can be counted as belonging to the ‘liberal media’ that has succeeded in being on the wrong side of the Brexit referendum and US presidential election – is not visible in India yet. But Goenka believes this is the best opportunity “you can get for high-quality journalism to come through”.
In his November 12 Facebook post, Zuckerberg said: “I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
Perhaps, WhatsApp forwards are not even on his radar. But Reddit has thought about them and if you want to avoid the annoying ones, here’s a protip: Log on to Reddit and subscribe to theunkillnetwork, a crowdsourced effort by Indian redditors to manage an avalanche of forwards.
https://the-ken.com/indias-misinformation-crisis-fake-real/