Getting your facts right

The fact checking website, Altnews, recently launched a mobile app. This can be used on an android device to request a fact-check of any given content, be it a verbose WhatsApp forward, or a digital image. All that’s required is “long-press” and Share. The website will revert within 72 hours with verification.

The time frame may seem long. But quite apart from sheer volume, fact-checking any given item often requires tedious “digital legwork”. Social media content mixes fact, fiction, opinion and garbage to create misleading narratives. What is amazing is that well-educated people often swallow nonsense without any application of thought or judgement. This is especially true when there is some religious element to the narrative.

My school WhatsApp group contains a bunch of very smart people, (present company excepted). We recently received a forward alluding to the “fact” that many Indian places of worship, dating back many centuries, had been built in a “straight line” running 2,383 km, North to South.  

Much was made of the fact that these aforementioned places of worship predated “the creation of imaginary lines on Earth by the British scientist about 100 years ago”. Somehow the builders had known how to put these all in a straight line before GPS was invented. The edifices in question are all placed between Longitude 79.06 East and 79.91 East according to the forward. Several people on my school group went “Ooh! Aah! The glorious Wisdom of the Ancients!”

Assume for arguments’ sake that this forward is fact-checked for rigour. The basic hygiene start with checking that the places mentioned actually have the stated coordinates. These do seem to be approximately correct according to GPS, which was probably used by the creator of the forward.

Now, we could check the rest of the content for veracity. We use map grids, of latitude and longitude, to define the coordinates of any place. According to the forward, longitude and latitude — imaginary lines — were invented by “a British scientist, about 100 years ago”.

This is rubbish. Gridded maps have been in use for at least 2,300 years. Greek sailors used them. Eratosthenes— the first chap known to have made an accurate guess about the Earth’s dimensions — proposed gridded maps, more than 300 years Before the Common Era (300 BCE). It is safe to assume that the Mauryans, who had extensive contacts with the Greeks, also used gridded maps.

Since the places of worship mentioned are of more recent provenance than 300 BCE, it is highly possible the architects did know how to put things in a straight line, by using gridded maps, sextants, and their knowledge of trigonometry.

Now let’s come to misleading content. A cursory look at a map tells you that the straight “line” in question is not a line as defined by that wise ancient, Euclid. It has both length and breadth. The distance between 79.06E and 79.90E (the Western-most and the Eastern-most places mentioned) is around 100-105 Km along a 2,383 kms stretch, North to South. So the forward is referring to a rhombus, 2,383 km long and 100-odd km in width. That’s about 2.4 lakh square km. Given any arbitrary area of that size, one can undertake to find places of worship, police stations, houses of ill repute, liquor vends and petrol pumps in any desired orientation whatsoever.

So how does the fact-checker deal with that forward? Can it be dismissed it as absolute garbage? It is not. There are glaring errors of fact such as the historical provenance of latitude and longitude, for example. But the places mentioned have the right coordinates.

The really misleading information is that they are not a straight line by any definition of the term. It probably took the creator of that forward about 15 minutes to put it together. It would take a fact-checker several hours to check all the details and even then, in the interest of “balance”, he would have to say it was misleading rather than absolutely false.

AltNews deals with more sophisticated and pernicious versions of such rubbish, day in and day out. Kudos to them for maintaining their sanity and rigour.  

Twitter: @devangshudatta