The Witch Hunts of Our Times: India and Fake News

In Medieval Europe, a person could be accused of witchcraft with very thin evidence, often not much more than gossip. In today’s Pakistan, the same often works with accusations of blasphemy. The mechanism is in some ways similar: Many people believe what they want to believe and are inclined to seek the confirmation of their worldview, even based on scant, unconfirmed, or awkward information. This is what social scientists call “confirmation bias.”

Although in much of today’s world law and governance are more just than in Medieval Europe, we still face our confirmation biases. And while we have much wider access to information and are generally much better educated than the people that used to declare others witches or Satan’s agents, we are also flooded with news to a point that it becomes impossible to verify much of what we read and hear.

The problem is global, although it is particularly acutely felt in regions like South Asia, with its social conflicts, wild media, and a rapidly rising number of netizens. Recently, I wrote for The Diplomat about people who are fighting the fake news epidemic in India. The people behind one of the better-known anti-fake news website, Alt News, decided to write a book about their experience. 

Titled India Misinformed: The True Story and authored by Pratik Sinha, Sumaiya Shaikh and Arjun Sidharth, the book is a review of some of the major fake news stories and common subjects. The title, India Misinformed, corresponds well to another recent publication, India Connected by Ravi Agrawal, and so do the contents of both books. India Misinformed shows the methods and goals of fake news peddlers, while India Connected – while not being about misinformation as such – paints a much wider canvas: How the digital revolution, with its advantages and flaws, is changing India.

The disenchanting part of the book is that it mostly covers the best-known stories debunked by Alt News. It is a “best of” list that puts together the virtual stories into a print publication. There are a few important conclusions, however, that stem both from the fake news slayers’ recent work in general, as well as from this book, in particular. They touch upon the nature of fake news and their spread, but also tell us a lot about society as such, and not just Indian society.

First: Fake news thrives on the fear of the Other; it is fueled by confirmation bias and breeds on ignorance (and inevitably all of us are ignorant of many things). The authors show how often misinformation is based on generalized, stereotypical notions of others: foreigners, people of another community, or even other region in the same country. The cases described in the book – and these resonated through the press as well – show how the most horrendous effects of fake news in India were attacks on people from other parts of the country. A few times false information about strangers coming to a given region to abduct children resulted in innocent people from other parts of the country being murdered. 

The phenomenon of fake news confirms that we can live side by side with other communities and yet know precious little about them. In pre-Holocaust Europe, some would believe the most outlandish claims about Jews (for example, that they used the blood of children in their rituals). And yet European Jews did not live on faraway islands; they were based in many European cities and mixed often with people of other communities. Some of the fake news described in India Misinformed confirmed stereotypes of Muslims, often about having many wives and children. The most shocking were dehumanizing, for example describing Rohingyas as child-eaters.

Second: Fake news does not always spread incidentally, and the authors are not always mistaken everymen, random people without real power (their sole power being their access to the internet). There are vested interests behind a portion of the fake news machinery; there are people that may either concoct lies or at least spread them for their own benefit. These may be individuals connected to a political party who want to reinforce their agenda, but others may include businessmen seeking to make a profit.

The authors quote Amit Shah, the then-president of India’s ruling party, the BJP, who once laughingly told a story about a volunteer in his party. The person spread fake information about a politician of a rival party. Curiously, Shah’s words did not entirely condemn the idea of fake news: “So, the message went viral. One should not do such things. But in a way he [the BJP volunteer] created a certain (mahaul) perception. This is something worth doing but don’t do it!” 

The book also mentions that the same party had two WhatsApp groups, which together numbered 3.2 million accounts, to spread its narrative. There is a powerful machinery behind the fake news ecosystem, and political groups may sometimes be a part of it. That said, the authors of the book are careful to note that fake news has sprung from all sides of the political divide.

Third and last: In a world with social media, we are all the media. We all are the targets of fake news, but we are also prone – in some degrees, at least – to spread it. Fake news is both a product of our minds and the reflection of its weaknesses. The authors of India Misinformed do not focus on the mechanism of why ordinary people press “share” upon reading a fake news piece, but the efforts of Pratik Sinha and others who fight misinformation do show that combating this epidemic is bound to fail without raising social awareness.