Online myth busters fight tide of fake news in India

NEW DELHI: As grief and outrage over the rape and murder of an eight-year-old crescendoed in India last week, a wrenching video of the supposed victim singing “her last song” lit up phones across the country.

But it was a hoax. The clip was nearly a year old and the girl someone entirely different, a lie that was discovered by a team of fact checkers who debunk the “fake news” shared by millions of Indians every day.

It is a herculean task exposing fake news before it spreads like wildfire in India, where an estimated quarter of a billion people use Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media platforms.

Small teams of myth busters must compete with huge volumes of content being shared in a multitude of languages, in many cases by first-time Internet users unskilled in discerning fact from fiction.

Independent fact checkers know the stakes are especially high in India, where fake news has quickly ignited violence.

Erroneous rumours of a salt shortage sparked panic across four states in November, triggering stampedes outside marketplaces that left one woman dead and countless injured.

Angry mobs in eastern India beat seven men to death in May after they were accused of child trafficking in unverified messages circulated on social media.

Govindraj Ethiraj, founder and editor of Boom, a fact-checking website, said his team encountered at least a dozen instances of fake news a day “that can cause serious harm”.

“India is perhaps the only coun- try where there are such violent outcomes of fake news,” he said.

“The way it manifests itself in India, I don’t think it happens in any other country. We are worst affected by this menace.”

Boom, which revealed the viral clip of the alleged child rape victim to be a fake, has just six people on its staff and is one of a handful of independent fact-checking teams in India.