India's fake news story

The book talks about how the Alt News team meticulously tracks the origins of fake news

India Misinformed: The True Story

Pratik Sinha, Dr Sumaiya Shaikh and Arjun Sidharth

HarperCollins, Rs 399, 270 pages

Alt News was launched in 2017 by software engineer Pratik Sinha to counter the menace of fake news, a global phenomenon that has been exacerbated by the spread of social media. Major events of this decade, from Donald Trump’s election to Brexit to India’s turn towards the right after 2014, have been variously attributed, at least in part, to the dissemination of fake news. 

Mr Sinha and colleagues have now compiled their major findings since the website’s founding into the book under review. From the BJP’s massive social media army posting (dis)information online to the Opposition’s selective targeting of the prime minister, the book covers a gamut of fake news propaganda that blurs the line between fiction and truth.

In quick chapters, the writers provide the source of the fake news and then proceed to debunk it with evidence. Since most fake news spreads through social media platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, it is rich in visual and semantic cues. Picking apart these carefully constructed information bits, the writers provide original sources of the photographs and videos that are circulated with the context altered to meet what are often nefarious ends. 

Consider an example. A picture of Nehru that seems to show him being manhandled by a mob was circulated online last year with a caption that indicated that the violence was the spontaneous outcome of India’s loss to China in the 1962 war. In truth, the book informs us, the photo is from before the war and shows Nehru being protected by a security guard during a particularly well-attended Congress meeting. Without this clarifying context, it is easy to fall prey to the fake message’s interpretation.

The book is chock-a-block with such instances and notes on how the Alt News team meticulously tracks the origins of fake news using such tools as Google’s reverse image search. While the focus is largely on political personalities, the book also looks at pernicious events involving common citizens, such as the spate of mob lynchings around false claims of child abductions that took place in mid-2018.

Although the book is a valuable compendium of fake news claims and the website’s commendable efforts to invalidate them, it provides no discussion on why fake news has become such a potent force in our divided times, and why certain kinds of fake news find far greater traction than others. 

Consider the Nehru fake image discussed above. One Twitter user who shared it wrote: “Why didn’t he disperse Congress when Gandhi asked Nehru? He kept it for Indira, then for next and next. Is this nation a family property of Nehru?...” One notices here that the picture — which, even in its fakeness, ostensibly spoke about India’s defeat to China in 1962 — has little to do with the poster’s comment. 

In other words, the fake news machine works not merely to bring up particular historical points that continue to rankle — India’s defeat, say — but to use such moments to make a larger commentary about historical figures. The fake picture was used by the Twitter user in this case to criticise dynastic politics to which the Congress, more than any other party, has fallen victim.

This phenomenon is seen, most perniciously, when the propagation of fake news sows communal discord. One example is the stories from last year circulating about Rohingya Muslims who sought asylum in India after being thrown out of Myanmar. Accounts portraying these refugees as murderers out to destabilise India greatly enlarged their numbers within the Indian territory.

Although the book deflates such claims, it refuses to analyse the source of such anxiety. It is no secret that illegal immigration from Bangladesh has altered the demography of border districts in West Bengal, a fact that has been used by some political parties to adapt their vote appeals in the current election season. 

Speaking of such matters is verboten in traditional media for fear of destabilising India’s coalition of coexisting faiths. But not addressing something does not wish it away. While fake news can be reprehensible, in some circumstances it can allow the articulation of ideas and anxieties that are too controversial to be raised by un-fake media.

India Misinformed takes a measured, non-partisan stance towards the phenomenon it seeks to expose. There are exposés of fake news against both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi, though, of course, the numbers pertaining to the latter are far higher given the zeal with which the BJP IT army functions. 

Yet, the book would have made for richer reading had it gone beyond chronicling and discrediting this menace of the modern media age and looked into the reasons and conditions that allow it to not just exist but thrive in a manner that has now become the headache of governments, investigation agencies and tech companies.