Social media struggles with fake news ahead of India polls

NEW DELHI: Two weeks after a suicide bombing in Kashmir in February killed 40 policemen, a Facebook user called Avi Dandiya posted a live video in which he played a recording of a call purportedly involving India’s home minister, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an unidentified woman.

The trio could be heard talking about arousing nationalist sentiment ahead of India’s general election, with the BJP president allegedly saying in Hindi: “We agree that for election, we need a war.”

Within 24 hours, one of Facebook Inc’s fact-checking partners in India, Boom, exposed Dandiya’s video as fake.

An analysis on Boom’s website said the video was created by splicing audio from older political interviews.

By the time Facebook took down the post, it received more than 2.5 million views and 150,000 shares.

There is no Indian law that targets fake news, but police in New Delhi registered a case of forgery against Dandiya and an official said investigations were ongoing.

Reuters last week found four edited copies of Dandiya’s videos on Facebook with about 36,000 views.

One on YouTube has been seen 2,800 times while another on Twitter has 22,000 views.

Messages and emails to Dandiya, an avid Facebook user who last appeared in a live video on March 23, went unanswered.

The home ministry, the BJP president and party’s information-technology chief did not respond to requests for comment.

The videos underline how social media companies struggle with fake news in India despite saying they’ve taken steps to tackle the menace ahead of India’s general election, which starts on April 11.

With 900 million people eligible to vote and an about half-a-billion with Internet access, fake news can have a huge impact on the polls.

On Monday, Facebook said it deleted 1,126 accounts, groups and pages in India and Pakistan for “inauthentic behaviour” and spamming, many linked to India’s opposition Congress party.

Google partnered with fact-checkers to train 10,000 journalists this year to better tackle fake news.

Facebook’s popular messaging app WhatsApp has launched newspaper and radio campaigns to deter the spread of misinformation.

Social media companies say they don’t remove all fake posts as that would jeopardise free speech.

Facebook has said that circulation of posts which are debunked, or discovered to be fake, is reduced by more than 80%.

Posts that violate Facebook’s community guidelines, including hate speech or content that incite violence, are completely deleted, the company said, adding that Dandiya’s video came under that category.

But even when content has been identified as fake and removed, slightly modified versions of the same content can escape detection and spread further.

“This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won’t catch everything – but we’re making progress,” said a Facebook spokesman, who added the overall volume of false news had been reduced on the platform. — Reuters

This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won’t catch everything – but we’re making progress.

Facebook spokesman