With the elections almost here, you are likely to encounter more of it on social media, and through a seemingly innocuous forward by a dear uncle. Ready to take on fake news?
On March 10, when the Election Commission of India announced the dates for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, it made it clear that the model code of conduct would apply to social media content posted by political parties. Internet giants including Facebook, Twitter and Google have been instructed to take immediate action against fake news and hate speeches on their platforms. Over half a billion Indians, after all, now have access to the Internet, which holds sway over them in more ways than they can imagine.
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After the announcement, though, concerns were raised about the success of the EC's crackdown. While the code of conduct applies to official social media accounts of political parties, it does not apply to the countless fan pages and affiliate handles that continue to multiply exponentially as you read this article. The worldwide web was built essentially to disseminate information. That it has two evil siblings — misinformation and disinformation — is a phenomenon playing out dangerously in the form of fake news; one that prompts your erudite relative to hit 'forward' on a doctored WhatsApp message, and a mob to take to lynching. What is fake news? How does it travel? Why do people fall for it? Can it be stopped? We spoke to social media experts, a cyber crime specialist, and psychologist for answers.
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Journalist Abhisar Sharma was recently a victim of fake news that suggested he bribed a villager; it was debunked
The phenomenon
To understand fake news and its wide reach, Nishant Shah, professor of new media, and co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru, tells us that it is important to understand what constitutes the ability of a consumer to gauge the authenticity of a piece of information. "This capacity was never about the information itself, but the context in which you consumed it," he says. "For example, 30 seconds into listening to the radio, you can tell which channel you are tuned into. But in the case of a digital medium, there is what you call a context collapse." So, the medium imposes a common aesthetic on a news website, a blog, and a propaganda page making it difficult for the reader to tell one from the other, Shah, whose recent project is on this aesthetic warfare, explains.
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Nishant Shah, Brijesh Singh and Jency Jacob
Bringing out the fundamental difference between the traditional sources of news, which include what you are holding in your hands right now, and what masquerades as news on social media, Brijesh Singh, Inspector General of Police, Cyber, Government of Maharashtra, says, "What is published in a newspaper goes via professional intermediation through the faculties of journalists and editors. But it is far too easy to broadcast content on an online platform, without any checks and corroboration. Also, while the print and broadcast media is accountable to the Press Council of India, and can be pulled up in the court of law, when it comes to the digital medium, we have to deal with anonymity, which makes investigation very difficult. Unlike bank accounts, there is no KYC [Know Your Customer] requirement for social media accounts."
Singh reminds us, "We are grappling with the phenomenon of weaponisation of social media. And fault lines, whether they are online or in society, are being exploited." Talking about these fault lines, consulting psychiatrist and author Dr Dayal Mirchandani says that we all tend to have prejudices, and are likelier to believe news, irrespective of its authenticity, that fits in with our beliefs. "That said, fake news is less likely to affect analytical and rational people as opposed to those who follow the herd mentality, or generally hold superstitious beliefs. The claims that fairness creams commercials make are false, but people do fall for them, after all," he says, adding that the layer of credibility that comes with receiving a forward from a close friend or relative contributes to the trust factor.
The tools
A better, more accurate way of dealing with fake news is to understand its two manifestations. "Misinformation entails taking a snippet from someone's speech or video, stripping it of its context, and putting it out there for people to judge. But it may be wrong to villain-ise it completely as the meme culture thrives on it," Shah explains, referring to the subversive potential of memes. "Disinformation, on the other hand, is deliberate manipulation of information for propaganda. So, what Zee News did by broadcasting doctored videos of Kanhaiya Kumar's speech is disinformation."
Singh gives a recent example of a Facebook Live posted by Avi Dandiya, which claimed that the Pulwama attack on Indian soldiers was orchestrated by the BJP. "He took separate pieces of former speeches by [Home Minister] Rajnath Singh and [BJP president] Amit Shah, and stitched them together. It was a classic case of what anonymity and doctoring can do. By the time it was taken down, it had already received two million views," he shares. "In fact, there are tools to create screenshots that look like grabs of legitimate tweets, Facebook posts and WhatsApp conversations."
Coming to the most vitriolic part of the phenomenon, Shah tells us that much of the trolling that happens online is algorithmic. "There are bots that pick up specific words and attack the user. The more offensive the trolling, the likelier it is to be algorithmic. Plus, human beings may get burnt out responding to trolls, but let's remember that algorithms don't get bored."
What you can do
Jency Jacob, managing editor of BOOM, an independent digital journalism initiative that specialises in fact-checking, joined the platform two years ago, miffed with the lack of corroboration of what was being passed off as news in mainstream media. Things, however, are better now. "While the number of propaganda pages have gone up on social media, the number of fact checkers is on the rise, too," he shares.
The first thing that consumer of online media can do, he advises, "is to not take claims at face value and not treat WhatsApp as a source of news. Well-known personalities, too, have learnt it the hard way. Perpetrators of disinformation rely on this inherent laziness of people." He suggests doing basic checks like right-clicking on an image to do a reverse image search to learn its source, or copy-pasting text from a forward in Google or Facebook to know where it came from and if it is as recent as it claims to be. "We owe it to ourselves to be digitally literate. Also, digital infrastructure needs to be treated as a public good, which cannot be handed over to private companies. If we as citizens could fight against Net Neutrality, we need to fight against this monopolisation, too."
Dr Mirchandani offers a simple solution. "Unless it is something worthy, why forward it at all? Know why you are on an online platform, and learn to put away your phone." Shah concurs. "If the internet has become a hate engine, let's not become its stooges. We just need to be nicer to each other."
Fake news vs fake news
In March 2017, a graphic claiming to be a survey by the BBC, placed the Indian National Congress at the fourth position in a list of 10 most corrupt political parties in the world. It was soon proved to be a false piece of news. Soon after, an almost identical graphic surfaced, this time masquerading as a CNN survey, which placed the BJP at the same position.
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