NO, THAT’S NOT TRUE
There’s a deluge of fake news on social media and some TV news channels, leading to the spread of dangerous disinformation. But there are a few intrepid fake news warriors who are now calling out such lies
In Kerala’s Kasargod district, Islamic State is luring young Hindus with money. The terror organisation has a rate card which carries the amount – one lakh to 7 lakh – given to IS recruits to convert Hindu girls. The rates are ~ 5 lakh for a Hindu Brahmin girl, ~ 7 lakh for a Sikh Punjabi girl and ~ 4.5 lakh for a Hindu Kshatriya girl.
At least, this is according to a report broadcast on an English news channel in June. The basis of the ‘rate card’ was a fake WhatsApp message which had been doing the rounds for more than a year.
It was one of the many distorted stories that were shared on social media and one which the news channel fell for.
Apart from influencing the political discourse and triggering communal violence, these stories – often in the form of an image with text written on it – can result in explosive situations when circulated in an already charged atmosphere. For more than two months, villagers in Jharkhand, a child trafficking hub, were receiving WhatsApp messages carrying pictures of purported details of child traffickers including their attire. The result? In May, villagers lynched seven men to death mistaking them for kidnappers.
It is in this backdrop that organisations such as AltNews, Boom and SM Hoaxslayer have taken it upon themselves to call out fake news. They monitor social media to identify information which prima facie appears false, verify it and if the information is fake, relay the correction.
It was an AltNews investigation that found out the truth about the IS rate card while Boom ran a reverse search to prove that the image of man and a little girl with blood on their faces, with accompanying text saying that they were making India secular by playing Holi with the blood of a cow, was actually a picture from Egypt.
With the surge of digital platforms and the penetration of smartphones, fake news reaches many more people than before. Which means that by the time websites debunk fake news, and prove that an image or video is false, it has already been shared by thousands of people.