A cross-industry collaboration takes shape to combat misinformation

Misinformation Combat Alliance to work on targeted intervention, media literacy

With misinformation assuming pandemic proportions and India producing the largest amount of misinformation on social media on Covid-19 (Sage study), fact-checkers in the country have their task cut out. To deal with this menace, 10 organisations in India have now joined forces to launch the “Misinformation Combat Alliance” (MCA) – a cross-industry collaborative effort aimed at combatting and limiting the spread of misinformation through targeted interventions and activities.

These organisations come from the field of fact-checking, media, technology and public relations, and include Factly, Fact Crescendo, Newschecker, People Like Us Create or PLUC, Tattle, The Healthy Indian Project or THIP, Youth Ki Awaaz, Yuvaa and Vishvas News (the tenth name is being finalised).

Misinformation Combat Alliance (www.mcaindia.in) intends to focus on media literacy, technology interventions, advocacy, community and policy. The aim is to reach out to every internet user in the country and make them media literate so that they think and question before sharing and amplifying misinformation. The alliance will also work towards building a community of truth-seekers through advocacy and outreach.

MCA President Bharat Gupta, who is the CEO of Jagran New Media, said, “We’re three months into 2022 and we’ve already witnessed the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, elections in five Indian states, and a war in Europe. As each of the events played out (and in some cases, continue to play out), there was an unfortunate, yet predictable, spike in misinformation. Even if we discount these outlier events, we continue to see misinformation in our daily lives” – whether in politics and current affairs or around health, finance, government schemes, consumer products and even entertainment.

Adding that membership to the MCA is open to all organisations and institutions who would like to play their part in combating the menace of misinformation, its Vice President Rajneil Rajnath Kamath (founder and director, NC Media Networks) said, “The war against misinformation has to be a collective one. We are planning initiatives around media literacy, technology and advocacy.”

According to the World Health Organisation, what we are grappling with today is an “infodemic” – “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.”

And India, it turns out, produced the largest amount of misinformation on social media on Covid-19 due to increasing social media consumption and users' lack of internet literacy, according to a study (“Prevalence and Source Analysis of Covid-19 Misinformation in 138 Countries”) published in Sage's IFLA journal.

Also, a 2018 study by three MIT scholars had found that false news spreads six times more rapidly on microblogging site Twitter than real news does. The paper (“The Spread of True and False News Online,” published in Science) added that false news stories are 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true