How do you counter the Hindutva ecosystem where the common well is being poisoned by disinformation campaigns and bogus claims, which are impacting lives? A panel of journalists comprising Sreenivasan Jain, N. Ram and Pratik Sinha discussed the issue threadbare in a conversation moderated by Ziya Us Salam at a session titled, “A Viral World: Countering Fake News”, at The Hindu Lit Fest 2024.
In Mr. Jain’s new book, Love Jihad and Other Fictions, co-authored with Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma, the journalists picked the most virulent examples of fake propaganda, including love jihad and population jihad, and debunked the theories with data, on-ground research and investigation. The problem, said Mr. Jain, is that these theories are being platformed at the highest level, by elected representatives. Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, who had also co-authored a book, India Misinformed, The True Story in 2019, said before the 2019 election, there was some amount of criticality, which is no longer the case. He said the issue of disinformation is many-layered, “it’s both political and cultural.”
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Mr. Ram, Director, The Hindu Group Publishing Private Limited, said there are two aspects to countering fake news, “and one is to safeguard your own media organisation from the invasion of disinformation and misinformation.” He said disinformation is deliberate, motivated and toxic news is weaponised and scaled up on social media platforms, while misinformation is not intentional; reporting and editing failures can be easily corrected. But the bigger challenge, he said, is how to combat the disinformation spread on bigger platforms like Meta, Google, or even X (formerly Twitter).
All the journalists agreed that it was important to “document our times,” truthfully and with stringent standards of reporting and research. They stressed on the importance of an independent media, a space which is “shrinking”, with Mr. Jain offering a sobering statistic about India’s low rank [161 of 180 countries] on the World’s Press Freedom Index. Is it possible to cultivate a temper of zero tolerance to fake news? “The fight has to continue,” summed up Ziya Us Salam.
