On a crusade against online fake news

With fake news rapidly turning into an epidemic, many entities are trying to come up with a solution. While Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced launching a new online publication that will aim to fight fake news, a few in India have already started a similar initiative.

But why is fake news such a big issue? A recent story in several publications showed pictures of a swanky new bus terminal at Rajkot, which looks like an airport. Well, it was indeed impressive, except that the pictures weren’t real. They are just computer generated renditions of the proposed bus stop, the work for which is yet to start.

But that didn’t stop people from sharing the story on social media, turning it into a viral news, which was far from reality.

While this may still sound like a mostly harmless misrepresentation of actual news, a WhatsApp message saying RBI has cancelled Axis Bank’s licence went so viral in December that it led to people withdrawing all their money from their Axis Bank account and eventually leading to RBI making a rare statement calling it out a fake news. But the damage was already done impacting the bank’s reputation, stock prices and even customers.

It is nearly impossible to track the source of such fake news and, therefore, controlling their propagation is not an easy task.

Govindraj Ethiraj, former Editor in Chief of Bloomberg TV India, has fighting the battle with fake news since 2014, with a not-for-profit platform called Factchecker.in.

“We started this platform in 2014 in the run up to Union elections to create awareness as this is when politicians often make unsubstantiated claims. The whole idea was to hold a mirror to people in public life,” Ethiraj told BusinessLine .

Ethiraj’s team of 11 has been researching to bring out facts exposing fake or misleading stories through factchecker.in and boomlive.in. Together the team is able to debunk 2-3 fake stories a day.

The two websites have applied to be a part of a larger International Fact Checker Network called Poynter. Soon, whenever you find a fake story on Google or on Facebook, the two platforms will also show you stories on similar topic from Poynter-certified fact-checking websites to make sure you read the facts before falling prey to fake news.

“In India, the issue of fake news is even worse because people who have no access to previous technologies are leapfrogged into the internet age. The complication is that it is difficult to solve from top down approach. Difficult to regulate with rules. Some content such as joke, parody are fake but important for us to be entertained. If we try to eliminate all fake news, we’ll be in trouble,” said Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of Bengaluru-based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society. Abraham said the only way to counter fake news is by increasing the information diversity in people’s diet. And websites such as factchecker.in are doing exactly that.

“Fact checkers are increasingly in demand. There is increasing demand for taking messages and coming up with counter messages. But efforts are not enough to match the barrage of information,” said Digital rights activist Mishi Choudhary.

Despite the challenge of tackling fake news being extremely large, experts feel regulating platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Google is not the right approach and making them liable will only complicate the situation further.

“Solution can’t be what Google and Facebook can do. The more we try to fix the problem by fixing Facebook, the more we are making Facebook important and allowing it to manipulate us with targeted content,” Abraham said.

He, however, said that in rare cases, government should be allowed to push messages countering fake news on such platforms to prevent instances of riots.

“Facebook and WhatsApp are not generating this content. They’ll become the decision makers and it is start of a slippery slope. They are supposed to be intermediaries and protected by safe harbours under the law. By giving them control over the content, you’ll turn them into a legitimate news source. I don’t think any regulation should step in and come,” Choudhary said.

Ethiraj points out that while making Google and Facebook liable for fake news may not be a wise idea, group admins ideally should be targeted as someone needs to be held liable to restrict people from creating and sharing such news.

Therefore, countering fake news with real facts could for now be the only solution but there’s a lot to be done considering the amount of such news floating around versus the few small website that are trying to fight against it.

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