‘POLITICIANS MAKE UNSUBSTANTIAL CLAIMS WHICH PEOPLE LAP UP’
In 2014, Govindraj Ethiraj, former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg TV India, started the not-for-profit platform, Factchecker.in to fact-check policy-level news. It wasn’t long before he realised the need for a platform that examined everyday news too. Enough reports, videos, forwards and statements seemed to be dubious, misrepresentations or outright lies. That’s how Boom, initially launched along with Factchecker as a news portal, turned into an independent digital journalism initiative, around the end of 2016.
“Especially after the election of Trump, news from around the world was being broadcast through WhatsApp and social media with velocity despite having no veracity,” Ethiraj says. “We realised there was a huge gap in what the media was trying to say and what people were believing, so we decided to use Boom to break down every such story.”
Boom’s four-member team works towards debunking at least two to three news items every day. Managing editor Jency Jacob checks WhatsApp groups for bizarre forwards and images that might need closer examination. The team does exhaustive web searches to look for plagiarism, does reverse searches for images to find their source and digs through news archives of credible sources like the Associated Press. Boom also has a helpline number, where people can send in any news item that sounds like a hoax. “The first step usually is trying to get in touch with the person who posted the news on social media. That starts off the trail,” says Jacob. “With WhatsApp that becomes difficult.”
The way they see it, there are two types of fake news: the kind with malicious intent, to defame someone or spread communal tension, like an image that recently did the rounds on Facebook. It featured a man and a little girl with blood smeared on their faces, with the accompanying text saying that they were making India secular by playing Holi with the blood of a cow. Boom’s research found that the photo was of people from Egypt. It had nothing to do with India or cows.
The other kind of fake news relates to food, health and wellness, and counters scientific research. Boom recently looked at a viral video claiming the presence of plastic in rice. They helped prove that while grains may be adulterated, there was no evidence of plastic impurities in the grains.
While the truth may be obvious to the team (and even many readers), much of Jacob’s efforts go into checking and crosschecking the stories verified by his team of three journalists. “We will face a huge credibility hit if our fact-checking is proved wrong, so we have to be extra cautious always,” says Jacob.
Other hoaxes get priority when they’ve been shared by someone well-known. “Politicians often make unsubstantiated claims and state random figures, which readers lap up,” says Jacob. “We do all the background research and then contact the person who has made the claim. Sometimes, they are apologetic, other times they are offended, but thankfully we have got no major threats so far.”
What they’ve got are trolls who don’t like hearing they were wrong. Jacob recalls how a few weeks ago, a user tweeted to his 47,000 followers a video that seemed to show an IS terrorist being taken down by a sniper. The video went viral. Boom traced the footage back to the AP archives and showed it to be a recording of a Venezuela hostage situation from 1998.
The user took down the video as soon as he heard from Boom, but his followers bristled. “They pulled out old tweets of mine and started targeting me personally,” says Jacob, while laughing it off.
Easy accessibility of digital news has made the circulating of fake news easy. “No one knows what a genuine source for news is. “While 230 million people have WhatsApp, they do not always have access to newspapers to verify what was sent to them,” explains Ethiraj. “What also comes as a surprise to us is how politicians cite numbers or share pictures which are clearly fake.” Jacob recalls how a Delhi journalist recently shared a picture of Yogi Adityanath drinking gaumutra directly from a cow. It didn’t take the team long to prove it was done on Photoshop.