Too much fact-checking

The biggest reason why fake news is flopping is because in recent times, real news has become so bizarre

Illustration: Satheesh Vellinezhi

Dear Agony Akka,

Whether there is any justice in this world? First of all, I am writing email asking advice from girl who is, I am thinking, half of my age. Worse, I have to call her ‘Akka’, like some plot twist in K. Balachander film Apoorva Raagangal . Whether you have seen it? I saw it in 1975, in Midland theatre: ticket price ₹2.90; popcorn at interval 50 paise; bus ticket up and down 40 paise. Rajinikanth’s first film, but storyline was so confusing even today I get headache solving the relationship riddle. Reviews are all saying aha-oho, but nobody is explaining jangiri -type plot. Last week, Rajinikanth was admitted in hospital. Official reason: BP fluctuation. But I am thinking real reason is headache from solving same riddle for 45 years. When I posted this on family WhatsApp group, my 10-year-old grandson is fact-checking me: “Actually, thatha …” My question is: how to deal with a pesky grandson who is checking my posts and forwards and humiliating me in family WhatsApp group? Is there any UN agency dealing with such chicanery?

—

Grandpa of a Twit

Dear GOAT,

Clear ly, you are dealing with a civilizational crisis in your family, which calls for some drastic action. For one thing, your easily outraged grandson sounds like he wouldn’t recognise a joke if it reached out and bit him on his rear end. If you don’t watch out, he will soon start hectoring all your family members at prime time, not unlike a certain high-decibel news anchor we all know (but wish we didn’t).

More generally, this business of fact-checking everything, even on family groups, is killing the limitless joy of spreading fake news, which even until a short while ago was carried out with so much delight by WhatsApp uncles and

thathas .

In that sense, the Golden Age of fake forwards is well and truly over. Fake news factories once operated on an industrial scale, relying largely on busy mamas and kakas to get the word out into every family circle. In fact, my friend Roshni tells me a professional YouTuber in her native Bihar was raking in lakhs generating weird conspiracy theories.

And I remember how a few years ago, a French Indophile commentator wrote a satirical article suggesting he had come across an old, rusting trunk with inscriptions by Nostradumus that predicted the rise of a man named “Narendrus” from “Gujaratus” as India’s “supreme leader”. A mainstream news channel fell for it and reported it as news. It used to be that easy. But, sadly, these days everyone is fact-checking everything. They are spiking all the fake stuff in real time. Where’s the fun in that?

But the biggest reason why fake news is flopping is because in recent times, real news has become so bizarre that no fake news factory is able to compete with anything half as sensational. My cousin in the Aadhaar office tells me that there was once an application in the name of one ‘Osama bin Laden’; obviously, a fake name, but the man’s real name, it turned out, was Saddam Hussein. Can any IT cell match that?

Then there have been instances of women marrying themselves in ‘sologamy’ ceremonies and, in at least in one case, a sologamist subsequently “cheated on herself”. Earlier this year, a Kazakh bodybuilder got hitched to a sex doll. Okay, that’s not so strange, you say. But the love story has a tragic twist — as a consequence of his weighty passion, the doll was broken in two, quite literally. Can any fake news match that for melodrama?

So, GOAT, your overzealously fact-checking grandson needs to be held in check. But in the absence of any UN agency, you’ll have to deal with him yourself. To disown him or to expel him from the family WhatsApp group seems excessive. Just follow the time-tested WhatsApp Uncle technique for wearing down family groups — bombard him with syrupy ‘Good Morning’ messages and devotional videos. That will teach him to fact-check you.

— AA

agony.akka@gmail.com