‘GOVT HAS TO STEP IN TO CHECK FAKE NEWS’
In August 2016, Pratik Sinha, Ahmedabad-based techie and founder of the website truthofgujarat participated in a more than 300 km long march on foot from Ahmedabad to Una to protest the flogging of Dalit men. Concerned to see that there was hardly any media coverage of the march, Sinha, and a friend decided to launch a digital outlet to talk about people’s issues. Debunking fake news was one of the objectives of the site. When they eventually launched AltNews in February this year, their posts on fake news attracted far more attention than the other features of the site. Since then, they have done numerous fake news breaks.
“We keep track of social media. We also keep getting messages from people asking us to verify forwards which do not appear genuine to them,” says Sinha. “Thirdly, we look for virality of an item on social media. For example, during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the US last month, his loyalists circulated a video claiming that it was Modi’s cavalcade in the US. The video went viral. We checked and found that it was footage of Barack Obama’s entourage from 2010,” says Sinha.
The possible impact a fake news item can have on people is also a parameter. On June 28, there was a protest titled ‘Not In My Name’ in different cities to condemn increasing incidents of mob lynching over beef. A TV channel ran a story claiming that Indian organisers were roping in people from Pakistan to organise similar protests there. Sinha found out that a Pakistani girl wanted to conduct a protest on the same lines in her country. She got in touch with one of the Indian organisers asking him if he could post the Pakistani protest information on his Facebook page. So, it was the Pakistani girl who initiated the conversation and not the Indian organisers, as the news channel would have you believe. “Such news items can influence people’s perceptions,” says Sinha.
Exposing fake news also made him realise that ideology is not the only driving factor for people involved in spreading halftruths, particularly through sites such as postcard.news and hindutva.info. “Money is a big incentive. They have understood that if you write about Prime Minister Modi, Yogi Adityanath or the Indian Army, you will get more clicks and thereby more advertisements,” he says.
Another emerging pattern is the appearance of a fake video coinciding with a major political event in the country. When the mainstream media was debating the Left versus RSS battle in Kerala, a fake video went viral showing a man being stabbed multiple times. The video claimed that it was an RSS worker being murdered by a Left worker. In fact, it was a video from Mexico.
People getting lynched by mobs is one very visible consequence of fake news. But that’s not the only impact. Sinha recalls a four-minute video that was supposedly of a Hindu Marwari girl from Andhra Pradesh married to a Muslim man; she was being beaten up and burnt alive by a few people belonging to the Muslim community, all because she was apparently not wearing a burqa. It is actually a video from Guatemala. “People have been sharing it since February 2016 and not a comma has been changed. It shows the kind of degenerative effect such footage has on people’s minds,” says Sinha.
“Also, they want people to believe that the media does not report atrocities on Hindus. Media will not talk about this, is a common refrain.”
However, he is yet to come across any evidence which points to the spread of fake news being organised, except for a few occasions when he noticed people associated with the BJP directly or indirectly forwarding such messages on WhatsApp or retweeting them. “But then anyone can fall for fake propaganda. I cannot equate that to say that it is organised,” he says.
Given the scale at which fake news is spreading and how people believe in it blindly, Sinha says that sites such as AltNews are not enough to fight the menace. “The government should put a solid mechanism in place to fight fake news and put out advisories telling people that this is a fake video, please do not circulate it. Newspapers and news channels should carry these advisories. Also, social media platforms, particularly WhatsApp, have a crucial role to play,” he says.