In just the past three weeks, over 25 people have been lynched across India due to rumours spread through WhatsApp. So when Pratik Sinha (founder of the website AltNews.in ) delivered a public lecture titled ‘The Fake News Epidemic’ at Vidyaranya High School recently, the hall was packed despite the evening rain. Sinha stated that these killings should be seen not as isolated incidents but part of a larger rumour-scaremongering pattern explicitly targeting minorities and ‘outsiders.’
Pratik pointed out that, “In the past two years, internet consumption in India has increased tenfold. We have a huge section of the population that is using the internet for the first time.” There has been a 22% increase in rural internet usage and that “is an important figure because it correlates with what we are seeing today — these people treat their WhatsApp inboxes like a newspaper.”
He also spoke about one of their latest busts- the viral tweet which claimed that 96% of the rapes in the country, according to NCRB statistics were committed by one particular community. The fact is that NCRB does not publish statistics based on religion but by the time they had given an official statement on the matter, the tweet was already viral. As a study published in Science magazine shows, fake news spreads six times faster than true news on Twitter. What makes things even more difficult is that there are leading news accounts that share/retweet false information like this as well.
While there are laws in place to punish publication of false and malicious content, WhatsApp encryption makes it impossible to distinguish between the source of the information and the disseminator. Furthermore, as the number of times something is shared increases, the more likely it is that the original content has been diversified into memes, gifs and infrographics. This makes the resistance to the epidemic particularly challenging.
Websites like Pratik’s can only do so much; especially when the misinformation industry is growing at an exponential rate. AltNews is in the process of trying to develop an app where fact checking will be possible against a localised database of debunked news and the search engine will enable you to upload WhatsApp images and links to check its credibility. Until then, we can use Google reverse image search and the date filter to verify suspicious news items on a daily basis.
Pratik is optimistic about the AltNews app and is looking for people to help out with the technological aspects as well as for translation into local languages.
