THE WAR ON FAKE NEWS
It’s time for pushback. Ritwik Sharma and Amrita Singh on the fake news warriors who, deciding enough is enough, are trying to do something about the scourge of our times
‘THEY MIGHT NOT HAVE TOILETS AT HOMES, BUT PEOPLE HAVE TV SETS AND PHONES [TO ACCESS FAKE NEWS]’ REMA RAJESHWARI SP, Jogulamba Gadwal, Telangana ‘WE TELL CHILDREN THAT EVERY TIME YOU GET UNVERIFIED INFORMATION, ALWAYS POLITELY ASK FOR A SOURCE’ MIR MOHAMMED ALI Collector, Kannur, Kerala
The Pa rd his of Central India are among the hundreds of tribes who were notified as criminals by the British. Though theindependent India did away with the criminal branding and bracketed the mas vi mu kt aja ti, or de notified tribes, the stigma tis ed Pa rd his continue to inspire a fear usually reserved for felons.
Rema Rajeshwari, an Indian Police Service officer, realised that people in a village under her jurisdiction were gripped by the same fear after a policeman observed something unusual in their behaviour. The constable patrolling Guvvaldinne village in Telangana’s Jogulamba Gadwal district — where Rajeshwari is posted as superintendent of police (SP)— found that the people were sleeping indoors although it was late March. The norm is to sleep in the open on sweltering summer nights. The villagers were also following a curfew to be home by 7 pm.
It emerged that fake videos and images of a purported Pa rd hi gang were circulating in the village. One of the videos showed a ghoulish spectacle of am an pleading for his life and being ripped apart by a group of four-fivemen.
“They might not have toilet sat homes, but people here have TV sets and smartphones,” says Rajeshwari, whohas initiated an awareness campaign across the district’ s 400 village sat a time when a wave of lynchings across India has laid bare the perils of fake news on social media.
For seven years, across the districts she has served, Ra jeshwari has continued the practice of forming a team of police officers that visits villages a couple of times a week. After sensing the paranoia among the residents of Guvv al din ne, she made sure the police made daily round sand educated them about fake news.
Ra jeshwari is among a handful oforganisations who have taken it upon themselves to educate people about fake news. Among other fake news warriors are an Ass am police office randa Kerala district collector. WhatsApp, often used as the platform to spread news that in cites, and Google, too, have joined the fight.
Fake news can kill. There is enough bloody evidence of that. According to an
India Spend analysis, between January 2017 and July 5 thisyear, 33 people were killed and 99 injured in 69 reported cases of fake news-triggered mob violence. The victims of the two lynchings in Te lang ana in May this year were suspected of being child lifters. Similar suspicions, triggered by Whats A pp forward messages, led to lynchings in West Bengal, Ass am, Tripura, Gujarat, AndhraPradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Odis ha.
“Children are an asset for farming communities, and these videos scared them ,” says Rajeshwari. As people started patrolling their village sin groups and questioning any stranger they encountered, she decided to step up the campaign. In the fashion of town criers with rustic drums, artist es were trained to educate village rs through messages such as :“Don’ t believe the videos. Don’ t take the law into your own hands .”
Police officers trained to sing and dance also began or ga ni sing programmes in villages that would educate while entertaining .“People identify better with songs,” says Rajeshwari. She now intend sto rope int hes ar pan ch s of 194 villages and, along with apolice officer assigned to each, create village Whats A pp groups to discourage the sharing of fake news. The village sin her area have remained peaceful despite the viral videos.
Far away from Te lang ana, when two youths were beaten to death by villagers in the tribal-dominated Karbi Ang long district of Ass am on suspicion of being xu pad ho ra( a bogey figure of a child-snatcher conjured up by parents to discipline kids), it shook the local population. Amid the outrage, the spontaneous anger and calls for justice alsodeep en the fault lines in the ethnic ally diverse state.
To prevent a conflagration, the police went out explaining to the public that there is no such thing a sax up ad ho ra. In the last three weeks, the state police has partnered with local media platforms to reach out to people on Facebook and Twitter, says HarmeetSingh, additional director-general of police( security ), Ass am Police. Senior police officials have also been or ga ni sing district-wise sen sit is at ion meetings with village rs. Senior citizens, village head men and volunteers who are part of community policing in remote areas have been brought together, says SreejithT, the SP of Ass am’ s Dar rang district.
The police have also stepped up enforcement and arrested more than 40 people, including the ones who had circulated the messages on Whats A pp. Social media initiatives, including Facebook pages run by individuals, have helped bring down the negativity, says Singh .“We are not trying to look at it as a law and order issue. Communities have to engage with each other because if it’ s
xupadhora today, tomorrow it might be something else ,” he says .“Fighting fake news has to be a citizens’ initiative .”
The meeting in Darrang yielded results the very next day. A man was caught by a group who suspected him of being a childlifter. But instead of lynching him, they handed him over to the police. He was found to be mentally unstable and sent to nearby Tezpur city for treatment. In a state where the local electronic media competes with the rest of the country for shrillness and sensationalism, the mere handing over of a suspected criminal by amob can well be seen as an improvement.
Under a recent state initiative called “Sanskar”, the district social welfare officer, members of a government science, technology and environment council, an NGO and the SP have joined hands to fight superstition. Darrang police also tag factchecking portal SMHoax
Slayer to help identify fake news. But, given the low literacy rate in the district (63.08 per cent), Sreejith says social media measures have to be supported by human channels to reach all sections. “Awareness has increased due to our efforts, but people still have a lot of apprehensiveness,” he adds.
Much of this apprehensiveness can be traced to WhatsApp messages. On July 10, under pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government that has demanded greater accountability from the social media platform, WhatsApp took out a full-page advertisement in major news dailies explaining how to identify fake news in forwarded messages. It is another matter that the ruling party is seen as a beneficiary among political parties, as a bulk of the fake news generated on social media tends to whip up a right-wing agenda.
To help identify ho ax content, Whats A pp has unveiled a new feature that labels messages so that the receiver can check whether they have been sent by a close associate or are forwarded.
Google News Initiative India Training Network plans to train 2,100 journalists who will go onto train another 8,000 journalists to identify fake news through fact-checking
and online verification tools. Fact-checker BoomLiveanddata- drivenstart-up
Data LEADS are among its part ne rs.Sy ed Nazakat, founder and editor-in-chief,
Data LEADS, says that public trust in the media is highly influenced by fake news. “Media must verify information by seeking out multiple sources and disc losing as much as possible about the sources. We must invest in our newsroom and equip ourselves with fact-checking tools,” hesays.
A key aspect of the Google initiative is that it will train scribes in vernacular languages, too, Nazakatadds, while pointing out that English isn' t the principal medium of fake news in India.
Social scientist Sh iv Vis va nathan feels the current epidemic of fake news is a combination of or ali ty and technology. In a society with oral traditions, technology has given the rum our mill a push, making it easier for people to spread panic, suspicion and anxiety. He also views this as“a problem of large scale migration” and the lack of “citizenship” awarded to nomadic and tribal societies who have increasingly become objects of suspicion. For him, lynchings area product of “double mistrust” ofthe “stranger” and the police.
The blind acceptance of fake news as real stems from an unquestioning mindset. And the best way to prevent this is to nip it in the bud, as Mir Mohammed Ali would testify. The collector of Kannur district in Kerala has started a campaign called “Satyamev Jayate” to emphasise two basic points: the national motto (which translates into “truth alone triumphs”) and Article 51 A (h) of the Constitution, which encourages everyone “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”.
These formed the crux of a presentation he gave to 150 government schoolteachers last month. The teachers, in turn, are training students from Classes VIII to XII at 150 schools in the district. “Fake news may be a temporary phenomenon, but I want children to be smart enough so that when life decisions are being made for them, they should be able to apply their minds on their own. Our schools are not teaching that,” he explains.
Calling on children to be scep tic al about information they receive, the teachers explain to them concepts such as a filter bubble—skewing of information that an internet user receives as a result of an algorithmic bias. Other concepts include click bait and how it can be used by con men banking on the gullibility of users.
With a list of examples, from the benign — such as the photo-shoppedi mage of a three-headed cobra— to criminal cases filed against people who spread panic with ho ax messages, the teachers caution children how online credulity can have real world consequences.
“We tell children that every time you get unverified information, always polite ly ask for a source. And the source has to be mainstream, such as Manoramaor
Mathrubhumi[ newspapers] in Kerala, because if anything fanciful is happening, there's no way these publications wouldn' t reportit,” Ali says.
Last year, during a measles-rubella vaccination drive, there was resistance from several parents in Kannur for fears of children developing diseases despite receiving it or girls becoming unable to bear children later. It soon became evident that these pieces of misinformation were rife on WhatsApp, with people even citing religious reasons against vaccination.
After discussions with adults, the district administration turned to children .“They simply parroted everything they were told by their parents ,” says the collector. But once the children, aged 10 to 15, were explained everything with logical arguments, they tended to take a call themselves. Vaccination levels increased.
Levels of literacy in a region also dictate the sophistication of deceit, or the lack ofit.
In Kerala, Ali points out, the pranksters resort to nuanced misinformation such as typing circulars with the signature of the district medical officer or claiming that a particular antivirus that needs to be kept at sub-zero temperatures was being stored in schools without refrigeration facilities.
Ali doesn’t view a particular social media platform as a problem, for it won’t take any time for people to switch to an alternative if a particular one is banned. After all, the urge to “break” news exists in many of us. The challenge is to be able to tell the fake from the real.