How Fake News Busters in India Work Against The Spread of Misinformation

"I start working when I reach home from work. People tag me on Twitter, Facebook and message me on WhatsApp," explains Pankaj Jain, who calls himself the "founder and the only employee" of fact-checking website SM Hoax Slayer.

On April 2, 2020, a team of doctors, health workers, and revenue officials who had gone to identify the family members of a man who died of COVID-19 contraction were attacked in Indore — a city in India’s central state of Madhya Pradesh — after fake videos circulated on WhatsApp claimed that healthy Muslims were being injected with the virus.

Numerous lives have been lost too. Around 29 people were lynched in different parts of India after forwarded WhatsApp rumors suggested that outsiders were involved in kidnapping children. Other rumors led to the lynching of two men who were thought by the mob to be robbers.

Internet penetration has seen a rapid rise in India over the past decade. According to World Bank data, around 5.12% of India’s population had Internet access in 2009. A decade later, in 2019, the percentage of internet users rose to 41%. The figure is to only grow, with the number of active internet users expected to increase by 45% between 2020 and 2025.

The rising number of internet users is driven by India’s higher rate of internet adoption and dwindling data prices due to increasing competition. Government schemes aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country further aid internet penetration. With more internet users, the country is opening doors to enormous market potentials. However, another side that comes with the ease of internet access is going unwarranted and largely unchecked — spreading misinformation and fake news to lure the masses towards political and religious ideologies.

Social media platforms and instant communication apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp are becoming a hub for misinformation. The issue’s gravity and the dangers around misinformation came to light when they started leading to physical assault — some even leading to deaths.

Research around misinformation has revealed that there’s been a surge in fake news and misinformation, especially during the pandemic-imposed first lockdown. A 2020 study released by the University of Michigan showed around 60 incidents of debunked misinformation in the first week of April 2020 — around the time when most countries were imposing the first lockdown. Other studies testify the same, highlighting a barrage of rising misinformation.

According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, fake news and rumors saw a three-fold rise in 2020 over 2019. 2020 saw 1,527 cases around fake news being registered, which was a 214% increase from 486 cases in 2019. NCRB first included the “false/fake news” category in its database in 2018, where it saw 280 registered cases in the country.

As India continued to battle a raging pandemic, fake news and misinformation further complicated the challenge. Several pieces of misinformation on home remedies against COVID-19, origins of the second wave, vaccine efficacy, and religious misinformation found their way in people’s inboxes and chat messages.

“Of these, health-related misinformation is more prevalent and diverse, followed by religious misinformation,” fact-checking initiative Health Analytics Asia’s founder Syed Nazaka told DW. “Most of the health misinformation deals with the pandemic and that too, when the country is also in the midst of a massive vaccination drive.”

While the pandemic has fuelled the rise in misinformation, trust in mainstream media worldwide is diminishing. A 2021 study highlighted that 53% of people worldwide trusted the media, which significantly decreased from 61% in 2020. The distrust lays out a foundation for alternative information, paving the way for misinformation and fake news.

Of course, fake news isn’t just an India-centric problem. In a 2019 global study highlighted by Statista, 62% of respondents revealed that they’d encountered fake news on online websites and media platforms. 52% said the same about traditional media-delivery platforms such as TV, newspaper, radio, and magazines, highlighting the distrust pattern across media forms.

Rising cases of misinformation and little concrete action from Twitter and Facebook — the parent company of WhatsApp — have also kept fact-checkers busy in their effort to curb misinformation with verified facts.

Besides, the way misinformation and fake news is characterized invites the need for human intervention. Pennsylvania State University identified seven types of fake news: polarized content, false news, misreporting, satire, persuasive information and citizen journalism. Most misinformation tends to be biased, appealing to people’s emotions with little attention to the original source, evidence and facts. Since automation and algorithms cannot always detect misinformation on chat platforms, and digital interventions like ‘warning labels’ haven’t been shown to meaningfully reduce the spread of misinformation, human intervention seems to be the only option.

Busting misinformation with verified facts

“I start working when I reach home from work. People tag me on Twitter, Facebook and message me on WhatsApp,” explains Pankaj Jain, who calls himself the “founder and the only employee” of fact-checking website SM Hoax Slayer. Jain has been working on debunking misinformation since 2015 after being “disgusted” by how misinformation spreads through social media and instant messaging apps.

“Most of the time, these queries have already been debunked, so I copy the link to the debunked story from my website or other fact-checking websites and share it with them,” Jain says. “If a single person sends me a query, then it is not viral. If multiple people tag me for the same query, then it’s something serious and new, and I do my research on it, debunk the misinformation and post it in an article on my website.”

People contact Jain through his social media platforms and his website, where he has shared his WhatsApp number, asking people to share their doubts and “truth” with a link or proof. His social media posting through verified pages ensures that people share his investigation.

One of Jain’s most significant investigations that turned out to be effective in preventing the spread of misinformation was based on a 2016 rumor. The government of India had demonetised larger currency denominations in an effort to prevent money laundering and terror funding. The rumor suggested that the newly introduced higher denomination currency notes were implanted with a “nano GPS chip” to prevent money laundering and corruption.

“I wrote emails to many media houses that this fake news is circulating but didn’t get any reply,” he recalls. “But then I wrote about its impracticality — how something like that was impossible. Then people started noticing my website and it got a lot of attention.”

Prioritizing what to debunk is another factor that comes into play, as multiple queries flow in daily. It’s always a busy day in the office for the popular fact-checking website Alt News, co-headed by Prateek Sinha. “We get requests across multiple platforms. We have an app, a WhatsApp number, and even Twitter. On a busy day, we might get 200-300 requests per day. Our Twitter also gets numerous requests,” Sinha explains while citing recent news events that triggered headlines and drew attention from the public, adding that “misinformation is linked with what’s happening in the country because the very purpose of the misinformation is to corrupt the narrative of the flow of information.”

For Sinha and the Alt News team, prioritizing an influx of requests depends on the impact of misinformation on society. “Every time something happens politically, there’s an organized flow of misinformation to control the narrative. Priority is often based on current affairs — is it communal misinformation with an organized attempt to divide communities through misinformation, is it targeting specific individuals?” he explains, adding that misinformation can often be used as a “tool to defame and discredit individuals in the public domain.”

Increasing online bot campaigns and the ease of spreading misinformation online can make it challenging to debunk fake news, which can take the form of hearsay social media posts, well-intentioned personal posts or journalism based on fake data or preliminary reports, or fully and intentionally falsified information, among others. Deepfake videos where an individual’s face or body is digitally altered to represent someone else can be hard to identify, and with an audience that’s eager to forward everything that comes to their inbox, they can pose a severe threat. The number of deep fake videos is growing too. According to a Deeptrace report, there were around 8,000 deep fake videos online in 2019. Nine months later, the number climbed up to about 14,700.

Facebook’s algorithms do not help either, and generally post more risk when it comes to misinformation, something which became more evident after whistleblower and a former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen released a set of documents which included a 46-page research note section exposing the company’s 2019 experiment in India. In 2019, Facebook set up a test account in India to understand how its algorithms affected the way Indians consumed media on the platform. Three weeks later, the news feed became a whirlpool of fake news and gory images. “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life,” a Facebook staffer wrote, per the released research notes. According to the documents, what was more shocking was the revelation that the test account only followed pages suggested by Facebook. The research note’s author termed the experiment as an “integrity nightmare.”

The tools of the trade

Outside Facebook’s misinformation-spewing cesspool is a world where information constructs thoughts that then lead to action. In these perilous times, an independent factchecker’s role is a crucial one.

“There are tools that can help identify misinformation. But most of the time, [media consumers] want the truth to be served to them, instead of being on the lookout,” says SM Hoax Slayer’s Jain. Since not everyone is willing to do the homework to identify misinformation, Jain, Sinha, and other fact-checkers make it their responsibility. Explaining how one can go about finding if a piece of information is credible, Sinha says, “If it’s an image that’s being claimed to be something, you might use reverse image search. If there’s a new image or video and there’s a narrative being spun around it, then you might want to find the actual narrative behind it — what happened. And if it is something old, then you might use something like reverse image search [to find out different sources for the misinformation].”

Sinha feels that debunking misinformation is something people must learn, as some involve simple digital skills. “Unfortunately, corporate social media platforms swimming in millions of dollars do not offer tools that can help with finding misinformation. Despite this issue being as old as it is, and despite misinformation being dangerous not just in India but globally, there’s not a single tool that helps people fact check better, which explains a lot about the priorities of these companies,” he says.

On the face of it, tech companies such as Twitter have found responses in tags and labels, but the effectiveness of these strategies is debatable. Consider Twitter’s role in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, for example. The company put out warning labels to prevent the spread of fake news and misinformation. However, The Washington Post’s research revealed that Donald Trump’s tweets with warning labels spread more than those without them. Combined with findings that misinformation on Twitter spreads more than factual stories, the pattern highlights Twitter’s unpreparedness for an event as significant as the U.S. presidential election, an area where its reputation had already been marred. Twitter has since been updating the label feature.

Getting away without accountability

The rise in misinformation has much to do with establishing a political narrative, and India’s ruling party — the BJP — finds itself being a misinformation mouthpiece, most of which generated and spread through social media platforms.

An independent study on misinformation pointed out by The Print revealed that over 17,700 pro-BJP Twitter accounts served as misinformation sources. For the major opposition party — Congress — the number of misinformation-spreading accounts stood at 147. Other investigations have credited multiple pieces of misinformation to BJP’s ‘online propaganda machine,’ Amit Malviya, who fronts the party’s internet presence as its IT cell chief.

“Cases of misinformation tend to rise during the time of elections. Sometimes, influential people and journalists make a mistake out of their bias and spread misinformation. Often they realize their mistakes and take them down. Then some intentionally spread political misinformation until it gets to a point where it’s spread on instant messaging apps like WhatsApp,” says Jain.

The rising number of independent fact-checkers like Jain, those at an organizational level like Sinha, and the establishment of support groups such as the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) haven’t deterred the confidence of those spreading misinformation and fake news. Sinha thinks that those who spread misinformation are only “getting bolder” with “support from the state,” making them feel they can get away without any accountability to the society. The lack of social and public responsibility in terms of law only emboldens them.

“Because organizations want to do business in India, they go easy on hate speech and do not shut out accounts that indulge in it because they do not [want to] displease the people in power,” he says, adding that someone like Trump could be deplatformed in the U.S., but those spreading misinformation in India are not.

Sinha also feels that there’s passive support for those who spread misinformation. “The way things are done and the closeness of individuals involved in multiple misinformation campaigns with the establishment might make one think that there is massive support,” he says.

Social media, an ‘unruly town’

Sinha looks at social media as a highway where multiple cars are driving. “Right now, it’s an unruly town where nobody or very few people are observing traffic rules,” he says. Unruly drivers need to be schooled, the equivalent of which is deplatforming on social media. “I do feel that those who spread misinformation must be deplatformed. When Trump got the ax, an article was written on how misinformation went down because he was retweeting them. Those kinds of actions need to be taken,” he explains.

India has had a history of communalism, and numerous lives being lost over the decades in Hindu-Muslim riots. Law and propaganda touching on this may be more digestible than the truth because of the emotional connection between the partition history and the death of thousands of people. The role of widespread BJP supporters in propagating this spread online has been significant. The party’s online engine running on a disinformation rail — fronted by its IT-cell chief Malviya — has been successful in specifically preying on the emotions and fears connected to the decades of Hindu-Muslim violence related to the history of partition. And this is where the role of society in managing these emotions comes into play. “A responsible society would say that let’s seal these emotions, but a society where you want to harvest guilt feelings for politics’ sake would want to utilize such emotions to make them politically relevant,” Sinha explains.

The sensitivity of misinformation cannot go unaddressed, and keeping repeat offenders in check is a way to go about it. Another way — one that recognizes individuals’ and organizations’  role in curbing misinformation based on facts rather than the state’s widely-propagated version of the truth — is to support fact-checking networks such as SM Hoax Slayer and Alt News, which accept donations from those who find their work valuable.

Jain thinks of debunking misinformation as a personal project — something which he does outside his full-time business in Mumbai, receiving enough to sustain the website and his fact-checking projects. Sinha, however, has more extensive plans.

The way forward

Sinha’s expansion plans for Alt News and spreading awareness about misinformation among people come when more organizations are working towards the cause. More subsidiaries of established news sites are coming up with their misinformation-busting campaigns, and their extensive media reach ensures that more people are aware of the news’ credibility. Fact-checking organizations are teaming up to conduct workshops to teach individuals fact-checking skills, tools, and techniques. A 2019 workshop by Internews and DataLEADS in collaboration with fact-checking websites BoomLive, Alt News, First Draft, and Storyful, along with support from the Google News Initiative, organized over 350 training events, helping more than 13,500 journalists and journalism students across more than 85 Indian cities become more familiar with fact-checking process.

“We have received a lot of support because we have covered complicated and sensitive stories that other fact-checkers have not,” he says, adding that there have also been legal consequences. However, public support despite legal scrutiny helps them keep going in the long run.

Alt News has been a go-to source for identifying communally painted misinformation. Time and again, they have pointed out repeat offenders from India’s ruling party gullible of sharing forged documents. They have also shed light on the involvement of BJP’s IT cell with the Election Commission — a body that ought to be independent — in the Maharashtra state. Alt News has stayed active through most politically and socially tense situations in the past few years, and one of their most significant achievements has been being listed as a resource for both fact-checking and investigation assistance by the Bureau of Police Research and Development under India’s Ministry of Home Affairs.

To address the root cause of misinformation one step at a time, Sinha wants to branch out to make people more aware of how misinformation works. He is also hoping that he gets support from local governments for his plans that involve topics on misinformation in school curriculums with backing from grassroots organizations. The curriculum would cover critical thinking, how to deal with misinformation, and how a child can deal with the emotions around misinformation. The curriculum will also teach students how to differentiate between clickbait and news, among other related subjects.

When asked whether he’d like to expand these plans around setting up a curriculum on a national level, Sinha chuckles, “They won’t let us do that. Right now, the only hope is seeking help at a state level.”

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