On the frontline of India's WhatsApp fake news war
MOBS have lynched at least 25 people across India after reading false rumours spread on WhatsApp. Now the authorities in one Indian state are fighting back - by teaching children about fake news.
In a state-run secondary school in the sticky coastal city of Kannur in the southern state of Kerala, some 40 students have thronged a classroom for an unusual lesson.
As the uniformed boys and girls in separate rows slide into their seats, there’s a question on the projection screen for them to answer: What is fake news?
Students read the answer aloud from another slide.
“Fake news is completely false information, photos or videos, intentionally created and spread, to confuse the public, spread mass panic, provoke violence and get attention.”
For a moment, it sounds similar to a rote-memorisation drill, common in rigid Indian schools.
But teacher Bindhya M, a post-graduate in computer science, quickly joins in and gets down to brass tacks.
“If you get a message on WhatsApp saying there will be an earthquake in Kannur tomorrow, would you believe it and share it with your friends?”
“Yes,” chime the students, weakly.
Should it be shared? Ms Bindhya asks again, her voice rising.
This time the children realise that there’s something amiss. “No!” goes up a loud chorus. “You have to question and cross check what you receive on WhatsApp. Always,” says Ms Bindhya. More than 1, 500 students attend the school in Kannur, one of the last remaining Communist bastions in India.
Although the place has gained some infamy for bloody fighting between the Communists and the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers’ Organisation) - more than 200 people on both siwdes have been murdered since 1972 - it is one of India’s most socially developed districts. Some 95 percent of its 2.5 million people are literate. More than half of them live in towns.
On the face of it media literacy appears to be sturdy: the most widely read paper is the venerable Malayalam Manorama, which boasts a state-wide readership of 16 million, one of the highest in the world. Students leading morning assemblies in schools skim the pages of half-adozen newspapers and read out the headlines.
Despite such levels of literacy and urbanisation however, Kannur has been in the grip of fake news and viral hoaxes travelling on WhatsApp in recent years. To combat this, district officials have now begun 40-minute-long fake news classes in 150 of its 600 government schools.
Using an imaginative combination of words, images, videos, simple classroom lectures and skits on the dangers of remaining silent and forwarding things mindlessly, this initiative is the first of its kind in India. This is a war on disinformation from the trenches, and children are the foot soldiers.
In Kannur, as elsewhere in India, WhatsApp, the Facebookowned encrypted messaging service, is the main carrier of fake news and viral hoaxes. India has 300m smartphones, and more than 200m of them have WhatsApp, making the country the service’s biggest market.
WhatsApp claims 90 percent of the 65bn messages sent over the service every day in 60 languages are between two users. But in India, fake news and hoaxes are rashly spread through thousands of groups, each of which can have a maximum of 256 members and work as private chat rooms. (For an idea of the popularity of WhatsApp groups in India, consider this: last year, before the crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP alone created more than 6, 600 WhatsApp groups to spread the party’s message.)
Messages circulating in WhatsApp groups in India range from jaunty good morning messages and all kinds of greetings to gossip, jokes, pornography and lots of fake news, hoaxes and rumours. When it comes to fake news and hoaxes, even well-meaning people believe messages forwarded by friends and relatives on WhatsApp because, as one parent told me, “how can people close to us be so wrong”.
Back in the classroom, the students are shown a bunch of slides about common fake news and messages that they have might have received or heard of in recent months.
There’s an image of two men on a motorcycle pulling up to a group of children with a message that people were kidnapping children in the area - this single message-fuelled rumour has led to the killing of at least 25 people in other parts of India since June.
Another message saying Mahatma Gandhi, the independence hero, was a womaniser perplexes students. “I was shocked when I got it,” says 17-year-old Amit P. “Is it true?”
Fake news is completely false information, photos or videos, intentionally created and spread, to confuse the public, spread mass panic, provoke violence and get attention.” — Students