How fake news warriors are trying to eliminate the scourge of our times

The Pardhis of Central India are among the hundreds of tribes who were notified as criminals by the British. Though the government in independent India did away with the criminal branding and bracketed them as vimukta jati, or denotified tribes, the stigmatised Pardhis continue to inspire a fear usually reserved for felons.

Rema Rajeshwari, an Indian Police Service officer, realised that people in a village under her jurisdiction were gripped by the same fear after a policeman observed something unusual in their behaviour. The constable patrolling Guvvaldinne village in Telangana’s Jogulamba Gadwal district — where Rajeshwari is posted as superintendent of police (SP) — found that the people were sleeping indoors although it was late March. The norm is to sleep in the open on sweltering summer nights. The villagers were also following a curfew to be home by 7 pm.

It emerged that fake videos and images of a purported Pardhi gang were circulating in the village. One of the videos showed a ghoulish spectacle of a man pleading for his life and being ripped apart by a group of four-five men.

“They might not have toilets at homes, but people here have TV sets and smartphones,” says Rajeshwari, who has initiated an awareness campaign across the district’s 400 villages at a time when a wave of lynchings across India has laid bare the perils of fake news on social media.

For seven years, across the districts she has served, Rajeshwari has continued the practice of forming a team of police officers that visits villages a couple of times a week. After sensing the paranoia among the residents of Guvvaldinne, she made sure the police made daily rounds and educated them about fake news.

Rajeshwari is among a handful of individuals and organisations who have taken it upon themselves to educate people about fake news. Among other fake news warriors are an Assam police officer and a Kerala district collector. WhatsApp, often used as the platform to spread news that incites, and Google, too, have joined the fight.

Fake news can kill. There is enough bloody evidence of that. According to an IndiaSpend analysis, between January 2017 and July 5 this year, 33 people were killed and 99 injured in 69 reported cases of fake news-triggered mob violence. The victims of the two lynchings in Telangana in May this year were suspected of being child-lifters. Similar suspicions, triggered by WhatsApp forward messages, led to lynchings in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.

“Children are an asset for farming communities, and these videos scared them,” says Rajeshwari. As people started patrolling their villages in groups and questioning any stranger they encountered, she decided to step up the campaign. In the fashion of town criers with rustic drums, artistes were trained to educate villagers through messages such as: “Don’t believe the videos. Don’t take the law into your own hands.”

Police officers trained to sing and dance also began organising programmes in villages that would educate while entertaining. “People identify better with songs,” says Rajeshwari. She now intends to rope in the sarpanchs of 194 villages and, along with a police officer assigned to each, create village WhatsApp groups to discourage the sharing of fake news. The villages in her area have remained peaceful despite the viral videos.

Far away from Telangana, when two youths were beaten to death by villagers in the tribal-dominated Karbi Anglong district of Assam on suspicion of being xupadhora (a bogey figure of a child-snatcher conjured up by parents to discipline kids), it shook the local population. Amid the outrage, the spontaneous anger and calls for justice also threatened to deepen the fault lines in the ethnically diverse state.

To prevent a conflagration, the police went out explaining to the public that there is no such thing as a xupadhora. In the last three weeks, the state police has partnered with local media platforms to reach out to people on Facebook and Twitter, says Harmeet Singh, additional director-general of police (security), Assam Police. Senior police officials have also been organising district-wise sensitisation meetings with villagers. Senior citizens, village headmen and volunteers who are part of community policing in remote areas have been brought together, says Sreejith T, the SP of Assam’s Darrang district.

The police have also stepped up enforcement and arrested more than 40 people, including the ones who had circulated the messages on WhatsApp. Social media initiatives, including Facebook pages run by individuals, have helped bring down the negativity, says Singh. “We are not trying to look at it as a law and order issue. Communities have to engage with each other because if it’s xupadhora today, tomorrow it might be something else,” he says. “Fighting fake news has to be a citizens’ initiative.”

The meeting in Darrang yielded results the very next day. A man was caught by a group who suspected him of being a child-lifter. But instead of lynching him, they handed him over to the police. He was found to be mentally unstable and sent to nearby Tezpur city for treatment. In a state where the local electronic media competes with the rest of the country for shrillness and sensationalism, the mere handing-over of a suspected criminal by a mob can well be seen as an improvement.

Under a recent state initiative called “Sanskar”, the district social welfare officer, members of a government science, technology and environment council, an NGO and the SP have joined hands to fight superstition. Darrang police also tag fact-checking portal SM Hoax Slayer to help identify fake news. But, given the low literacy rate in the district (63.08 per cent), Sreejith says social media measures have to be supported by human channels to reach all sections. “Awareness has increased due to our efforts, but people still have a lot of apprehensiveness,” he adds.

Much of this apprehensiveness can be traced to WhatsApp messages. On July 10, under pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government that has demanded greater accountability from the social media platform, WhatsApp took out a full-page advertisement in major news dailies explaining how to identify fake news in forwarded messages. It is another matter that the ruling party is seen as a beneficiary among political parties, as a bulk of the fake news generated on social media tends to whip up a right-wing agenda.

To help identify hoax content, WhatsApp has unveiled a new feature that labels messages so that the receiver can check whether they have been sent by a close associate or are forwarded.

Google News Initiative India Training Network plans to train 2,100 journalists who will go on to train another 8,000 journalists to identify fake news through fact-checking and online verification tools. Fact-checker BoomLive and data-driven start-up DataLEADS are among its partners. Syed Nazakat, founder and editor-in-chief, DataLEADS, says that public trust in the media is highly influenced by fake news. “Media must verify information by seeking out multiple sources and disclosing as much as possible about the sources. We must invest in our newsroom and equip ourselves with fact-checking tools,” he says.

A key aspect of the Google initiative is that it will train scribes in vernacular languages, too, Nazakat adds, while pointing out that English isn't the principal medium of fake news in India.

Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan feels the current epidemic of fake news is a combination of orality and technology. In a society with oral traditions, technology has given the rumour mill a push, making it easier for people to spread panic, suspicion and anxiety. He also views this as “a problem of large-scale migration” and the lack of “citizenship” awarded to nomadic and tribal societies who have increasingly become objects of suspicion. For him, lynchings are a product of “double mistrust” of the “stranger” and the police.

The blind acceptance of fake news as real stems from an unquestioning mindset. And the best way to prevent this is to nip it in the bud, as Mir Mohammed Ali would testify. The collector of Kannur district in Kerala has started a campaign called “Satyamev Jayate” to emphasise two basic points: the national motto (which translates into “truth alone triumphs”) and Article 51 A (h) of the Constitution, which encourages everyone “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”.

These formed the crux of a presentation he gave to 150 government schoolteachers last month. The teachers, in turn, are training students from Classes VIII to XII at 150 schools in the district. “Fake news may be a temporary phenomenon, but I want children to be smart enough so that when life decisions are being made for them, they should be able to apply their minds on their own. Our schools are not teaching that,” he explains.

Calling on children to be sceptical about information they receive, the teachers explain to them concepts such as a filter bubble — skewing of information that an internet user receives as a result of an algorithmic bias. Other concepts include clickbait and how it can be used by conmen banking on the gullibility of users.

With a list of examples, from the benign — such as the photo-shopped image of a three-headed cobra — to criminal cases filed against people who spread panic with hoax messages, the teachers caution children how online credulity can have real-world consequences.

“We tell children that every time you get unverified information, always politely ask for a source. And the source has to be mainstream, such as Manorama or Mathrubhumi [newspapers] in Kerala, because if anything fanciful is happening, there's no way these publications wouldn't report it,” Ali says.

Last year, during a measles-rubella vaccination drive, there was resistance from several parents in Kannur for fears of children developing diseases despite receiving it or girls becoming unable to bear children later. It soon became evident that these pieces of misinformation were rife on WhatsApp, with people even citing religious reasons against vaccination.

After discussions with adults, the district administration turned to children. “They simply parroted everything they were told by their parents,” says the collector. But once the children, aged 10 to 15, were explained everything with logical arguments, they tended to take a call themselves. Vaccination levels increased.

Levels of literacy in a region also dictate the sophistication of deceit, or the lack of it.

In Kerala, Ali points out, the pranksters resort to nuanced misinformation such as typing circulars with the signature of the district medical officer or claiming that a particular anti-virus that needs to be kept at sub-zero temperatures was being stored in schools without refrigeration facilities.

Ali doesn’t view a particular social media platform as a problem, for it won’t take any time for people to switch to an alternative if a particular one is banned. After all, the urge to “break” news exists in many of us. The challenge is to be able to tell the fake from the real.