By Mansoor Hameed / Siasat
New Delhi: The recent police complaint by Kerala MP Hibi Eden against the manipulation of the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ pictures of Rahul Gandhi by the BJP’s “online hate factory”, has once again put the focus on the use of social media in India for peddling misinformation and hate.
Over the years, social media has turned into a battleground of the dirty tricks departments of the major political parties.
As per a research paper by S Md. Al-Zaman in 2021 titled “Social Media Fake News in India” published in the Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research, fake news shared on social media has six major themes: health, religion, politics, crime, entertainment and miscellaneous; eight types of content: text, photo, audio, and video, text & photo, text & video, photo & video, and text & photo & video; and two main sources: online sources and the mainstream media.
Health-related fake news is more common only during a health crisis, whereas fake news related to religion and politics seems more prevalent, emerging from online media. Text & photo and text & video have three-fourths of the total share of fake news, and most of them are from online media: online media is the main source of fake news on social media as well. The research paper said previous literature hints that online fake news in India serves mainly two purposes — political and religious, utilized by two groups, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) digital army and digital archiving as history-making to support the Hindu-nationalist government and gau-rakshaks (“cow protectors” or “cow vigilantes”) to harass or lynch the minorities, mainly the Muslims.
Four reasons may be helpful to define India’s current fake news problem: (a) higher social media penetration, (b) a growing number of Internet-illiterate people using social media, (c) the existing law that makes tracing fake news producers difficult (d) the rise of Hindutva (an ideology of Hindu-domination) and religious nationalism, the research paper said.
Social media is used widely in India to mobilize political activists for assembly and/or demonstration, and general public and vigilante groups for religious vigilantism and/or mob lynching, the research paper said.
Religion and politics often intertwine, creating a new type of fake news: religio-political, and WhatsApp is mostly used for such fake news propagation because of its instant messaging capacity, easier usability and wide reach, it added.
For example, WhatsApp fake news triggered the Muzaffarnagar riot in Uttar Pradesh in 2017, eight months before the federal election, and had both political and religious purposes, the paper said.
Also, fake, doctored, and old videos and photos are mainly used in creating religious and political misinformation in India. For these reasons, visual content is responsible for many of India’s health, religious, and political fake news. Previous studies also stated that Indian fake news is mostly WhatsApp-based, which is conducive for visual content.
This story was originally published in siasat.com . Read the full story here
