Two weeks after a suicide bombing in Kashmir in February killed 40 Indian policemen, a Facebook user called Avi Dandiya posted a live video in which he played a recording of a call purportedly involving the Indian minister of home affairs, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and an unidentified woman.
The trio could be heard talking about arousing nationalist sentiment ahead of India’s general election, with the party president allegedly saying in Hindi: “We agree that for the election, we need a war.”
Within 24 hours, one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners in India, BOOM, exposed Dandiya’s video as fake, saying that the video was created by splicing audio from older political interviews.
Illustration: June Hsu
By the time that Facebook took down the post, it had received more than 2.5 million views and 150,000 shares.
There is no Indian law that specifically targets fake news, but police in New Delhi registered a case of forgery against Dandiya and an official said that investigations were ongoing.
Still, Reuters last week found at least four edited copies of Dandiya’s videos on Facebook with about 36,000 views. One copy on Google’s YouTube has been seen 2,800 times, while another on Twitter has 22,000 views.
Messages and e-mails to Dandiya, an avid Facebook user who last appeared in a live video on March 23, went unanswered. Neither the home ministry, nor the Bharatiya Janata Party president or information technology chief responded to requests for comment.
The videos underline how social media in India struggle with fake news, despite saying that they have taken steps to tackle the menace ahead of India’s general election, which starts on Thursday.
With 900 million people eligible to vote and an estimated 500 million with access to the Internet, fake news can have an enormous effect on the election. For example, Dandiya’s video could seriously damage Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party if enough people thought it was true.
Policing content has become a massive global problem for social media, which have no template for consistently preventing online fake news or eliminating it.
Fierce Internet disinformation battles last year gripped countries such as Brazil and Malaysia ahead of elections. Authorities in Indonesia and the EU, which are due to hold polls, have warned of the threat of fake news.
In India, Facebook has partnered with fact checkers and, like Twitter, ramped up efforts to block fake accounts.
Facebook on Monday said it had deleted 1,126 accounts, groups and pages in India and Pakistan for “inauthentic behavior” and spamming, many linked to India’s opposition Congress Party.
Google has partnered with fact checkers to train 10,000 journalists this year to better tackle fake news.
Facebook’s messaging app WhatsApp has launched newspaper and radio campaigns to deter the spread of misinformation.
Social media say that they do not completely remove all fake posts as that would jeopardize free speech.
Facebook has said that circulation of posts that are debunked, or discovered to be fake, is reduced by more than 80 percent.
Posts that breach Facebook’s community guidelines, including hate speech or content that could incite violence, are completely deleted, the company said, adding that Dandiya’s video came under that category.
However, even when content has been identified as fake and removed, slightly modified versions of the same images, video or text can escape detection and spread further.
“This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won’t catch everything — but we’re making progress,” said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the overall volume of false news had been reduced on the platform.
“There’s no silver bullet solution in fighting misinformation,” she added.
Twitter said it deeply cares about the potentially harmful effects of misinformation and encourages users not to share unverified information.
A YouTube spokesman said that the company would continue to embrace the “democratization of access to information,” while providing a reliable service to users.
Twitter and YouTube did not comment on Dandiya’s video.
Another fake post that went viral recently was on popular Indian student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested and charged with sedition after a 2016 rally to commemorate the execution of a Kashmiri separatist.
Opposition parties said that Kumar’s arrest by federal police was an attempt by authorities to curb free speech.
Some Facebook posts in February described Kumar as anti-India and showed his photograph in front of a map that depicted some Indian states as part of Pakistan. Two Facebook fact checkers in India investigated the posts and said that the image was doctored.
Still, a month later, Reuters found at least two copies of those posts on Facebook with 375 comments and 1,500 shares.
Facebook in February announced that it was expanding the number of its fact-checking partners from two to seven.
Facebook says that it issues an alert to users who try to share a post that fact checkers have debunked, but does not prohibit further sharing.
Reuters found that when debunked posts of Kumar were shared, an alert popped up with a link to the fact checkers’ analysis. However, all four variants of Dandiya’s videos could be shared without an alert.
“There is no way you can solve this problem [quickly]... The magnitude of the problem is really huge,” said Kanchan Kaur, a Bengaluru-based assessor at the US-based Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
When tensions rose between India and Pakistan in February following a suicide bombing in Kashmir and cross-border air strikes, social media was flooded with fake news — old videos of captured pilots and photographs of earthquake-hit regions were spread as depicting current events.
“Since Pulwama, we’ve been working seven days a week,” BOOM managing editor Jency Jacob said, referring to the site of the suicide attack.
On a visit to BOOM’s office in Mumbai, five people were seen monitoring and analyzing online content. One of the rooms served as BOOM’s studio where television-style news videos are shot on debunked stories and published on its Web site.
As an industry, fact checking is rapidly spreading in India.
The British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) has in-house fact checking operations and a dedicated WhatsApp account on which anyone can flag suspected fake posts for further checks.
“A dedicated team of journalists is debunking fake news daily, and also writing detailed explainers on controversial issues and claims,” BBC India digital editor Milind Khandekar told Reuters.
Former software engineer Pratik Sinha and his mother are part of a 10-member fact checking initiative named “Alt News,” which is run out of a two-bedroom apartment in Ahmedabad, India.
Using online video verification and social media tracking tools, Sinha said that his team debunks up to four posts per day.
Debunked posts often remain online, which has even become a problem for the Indian Election Commission.
A WhatsApp message in February called for spreading the message that Indians living overseas could “now vote online for 2019 elections” and should register on the commission’s Web site. The commission called it “FAKE NEWS” on Twitter and filed a police complaint against “unknown persons” for public mischief.
A month later, the message continues to circulate on Facebook — a user who shared it on March 23 has so far received 42 likes and 19 shares.
When someone questioned the post, the Facebook user said: “I think you can vote. Just check the Web site and follow the steps.”
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