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Fake news warriors: Meet the people who debunk fake news, one post at a time

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prasad1

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In Kerala’s Kasargod district, Islamic State is luring young Hindus with money. The terror organisation has a rate card which carries the amount – one lakh to 7 lakh – given to IS recruits to convert Hindu girls. The rates are ~ five lakh for a Hindu Brahmin girl, ~ seven lakh rupees for a Sikh Punjabi girl and ~ 4.5 lakh for a Hindu Kshatriya girl.
At least, this is according to a report broadcasted on a national English news channel in June. The basis of the ‘rate card’ was a fake WhatsApp message which had been doing the rounds for more than a year.

It was one of the many distorted stories that were shared on social media and one which the news channel fell for.

Apart from influencing the political discourse and triggering communal violence, these stories – often in the form of image with text written on it – can result in explosive situations when circulated in an already charged atmosphere. For more than two months, villagers in Jharkhand, a child trafficking hub, were receiving WhatsApp messages carrying pictures of purported details of child traffickers including their attire. The result? In May, villagers lynched seven men to death mistaking them for kidnappers.

It is in this backdrop that organisations such as AltNews, Boom and SM Hoaxslayer have taken it upon themselves to call out fake news. They monitor social media to identify information which prima facie appears false, verify it and if the information is fake, relay the correction.

It was an AltNews investigation that found out the truth about the IS rate card while Boom ran a reverse search to prove that the image of man and a little girl with blood on their faces, with accompanying text saying that they were making India secular by playing Holi with the blood of a cow, was actually a picture from Egypt.

With the surge of digital platforms and the penetration of smartphones, fake news reaches many more people than before. Which means that by the time websites debunk fake news, proving that an image or video is flawed, it has already been shared and believed by thousands of people.


In 2014, Govindraj Ethiraj, former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg TV India, started the not-for-profit platform, Factchecker.in to fact-check policy-level news. It wasn’t long before he realised the need for a platform that examined everyday news too. Enough reports, videos, forwards and statements seemed to be dubious, misrepresentations or outright lies. That’s how Boom, initially launched along with Factchecker as a news portal, turned into an independent digital journalism initiative, around the end of 2016.

POLITICIANS MAKE UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS WHICH PEOPLE LAP UP: JENCY JACOB, MANAGING EDITOR, BOOMLIVE

PEOPLE ARE GULLIBLE. ONE POST IS ENOUGH TO CAUSE COMMUNAL HATRED: PANKAJ JAIN, FOUNDER, SMHOAXSLAYER



Recently, actor and politician Paresh Rawal shared a fake story on Twitter about former President APJ Abdul Kalam saying Pakistan had tried to get him to betray India. “I saw that the text had spelling and grammatical errors and wondered how someone like Paresh Rawal could fall for such an obvious hoax. I pointed it out to him on Twitter,” Jain says.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india...t-at-a-time/story-eLOYOfvrTMzn5AfuCfCRUP.html


 
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