Countering disinformation

This book is a compelling account of how India lives online, and what we can do - to make it a more dignified and inclusive space

Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent and True

By Saadia Azim

Published by Simon & Schuster India

494 pages ₹599

 In contemporary India, a rumour can travel through social media and messaging platforms faster than one can say “fact check”, and the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) means that even the most discerning viewer can fall prey to fake information. In these circumstances, figuring out a way towards a more digitally-literate citizenry and building a framework of checks and feedback to limit the spread of misinformation assumes critical importance. 

Saadia Azim’s Forwarded as Received  tackles this problem head on. In the Author’s Note at the start, Ms Azim writes: “The way forward will not come through censorship or control, but through the slow, difficult work of rebuilding trust — creating digital spaces where dignity is the rule, not the exception and where citizens reclaim their right to truth and conversation”. 

 

Through this proclamation, she also brings us back to the original promise of the Internet: A space that promised freedom to individuals, a space to share meaningful dialogue that might not have been possible in a physical capacity, and most crucially, a space to share and spread information at a speed higher than anything mankind had ever known before. 

Ms Azim, through her detailed retellings of various murders in contemporary India that took place directly as a result of fake news (one of the most famous examples being the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh in 2015) shows how “ancient brutality has become a viral impulse fuelled by misinformation, anonymity and misplaced social trust”. She also points out that there is a complete “absence of collective remorse”, making the case for the spread of disinformation a policy issue.

Apart from crimes that explicitly took place because of fake news, the book also scrutinises those where misinformation and disinformation ran rampant afterwards, as a result of social media platforms prioritising content that creates and echoes outrage. Ms Azim then presents a psychological study of those forwarding and amplifying such content — how the act of “forwarding as received” seems to absolve any kind of accountability in their minds, despite the very act coming from a sense of civic responsibility. She calls for a more intentional approach towards consuming and engaging with news, one that allows for space to fact check even on an individual level. 

Coming to the topic of fact-checking: Ms Azim points out in several places that the speed of verifying and debunking news, whether by the state or by independent actors, is rarely at the same speed and spread as the original viral content. To counter this, she proposes a robust “prebunking” mechanism, which refers to proactively warning people about misinformation and false claims online. She also calls for a robust feedback mechanism from the social media platforms themselves, urging them and lawmakers to ensure that there is enough human intervention to weed out posts spreading disinformation as well as those targeting individuals, communities, religions, and castes, especially in a country as diverse as India. 

The book tends to get repetitive at points, with Ms Azim going through the same problems and solutions after every few chapters. It works more like a textbook, where constant exposure to the material strengthens one’s memory and understanding of it — but for someone not seeking to utilise the book in an academic capacity, it might not work as well as a reading experience. 

Another criticism of the book could be levelled at how, after a point, its extensive detailing of the crimes and incidents that took place as a result of fake news and/or polarised narratives online feels more like a monograph than a work of narrative non-fiction. It almost feels like the author is focusing more on making sure that no event is left out, rather than ensuring that all of it comes together in a coherent fashion for the reader’s understanding. 

Regardless of its shortcomings, Forwarded as Received joins the expanding list of compelling non-fiction accounts published in the last few years of how India lives online, and what we can do — as citizens, journalists, and policymakers — to make it a more dignified and inclusive space.