The claim, however, was fake. No member of Congress, at either a national or a state level, had made any such statement. Yet delivered in the run-up to the election, and having spread with remarkable speed, that message offered a window into a worsening problem here. India is facing information wars of an unprecedented nature and scale. Indians are bombarded with fake news and divisive propaganda on a near-constant basis from a wide range of sources, from television news to global platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. The consequences of such targeted misinformation are extreme, from death threats to actual murders—in the past year, more than two dozen people have been lynched by mobs spurred by nothing more than rumors sent over WhatsApp.
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TNW uses cookies to personalize content and ads to make our site easier for you to use. The Facebook-owned messaging service has been constantly under fire after several people were lynched across the country over a misleading video that did the rounds for a year. The platform had to set up a team for India and run multiple programs to educate people about fighting the spread of misinformation. According to a recent report by App Annie , people in India spent nearly 47 billion hours in on the top five streaming apps in the country. The report noted that many YouTube viewers in the country are first-time internet users, and come from low-literacy backgrounds. As such, they struggle to differentiate between fake news and legitimate content. In recent times, one misleading video described the Rs. Additionally, some of the promoted accounts on the app have been found posting misleading content concerning the Congress party on other platforms, including Facebook and ShareChat. While WhatsApp and Facebook are arguably the most popular messaging and social media apps in India, apps funded by Chinese investors, like ShareChat and Helo, have found an audience in the country by offering support for content in regional Indian languages. Both apps claim to have more than 35 million users, and allow posts in 14 different Indian languages.
Old vs. new media
By the time police arrived in the hamlet of Rainpada on July 1, , the village council office was the scene of a massacre. The bright blue shutters on the windows were splintered and the door was kicked in. Inside, files were strewn across the floor and the light green walls were splashed with blood. Five men were dead, beaten to death with fists, feet, sticks, and office furniture wielded by a raging mob. The dead men—four in their late forties and one whose age remains unknown—had arrived in Rainpada earlier that day, at around 9 am, on a bus from Solapur, some miles south, to attend a Sunday market. The men sat under a tree not far from where they had gotten off the bus and, as they ate, handed a biscuit to a young girl. Six weeks later, Hemant Patil, the assistant police inspector for Dhule district, in which Rainpada is located, explains how this seemingly innocuous gesture had enormous consequences. For about a week before the men arrived, rumors circulated on the messaging system WhatsApp warning of bands of kidnappers roving the area and infiltrating villages to snatch young children.
MUMBAI, India — In the continuing Indian elections, as million people are voting to elect representatives to the lower house of the Parliament, disinformation and hate speech are drowning out truth on social media networks in the country and creating a public health crisis like the pandemics of the past century. A recent study by Microsoft found that over 64 percent Indians encountered fake news online, the highest reported among the 22 countries surveyed. India has the most social media users, with million users on Facebook, million on WhatsApp and million using YouTube. TikTok, the video messaging service owned by a Chinese company, has more than 88 million users in India. And there are Indian messaging applications such as ShareChat, which claims to have 40 million users and allows them to communicate in 14 Indian languages. These platforms are filled with fake news and disinformation aimed at influencing political choices during the Indian elections. Some of the egregious instances are a made-up BBC survey predicting victory for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party and a fake video of the opposition Congress Party president, Rahul Gandhi, saying a machine can convert potatoes into gold.
