New Delhi: When the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology proposed in January that any content marked as “fake or false” by the government-run Press Information Bureau’s Fact Check Unit must essentially be removed from the internet, it led to a flurry of scrutiny of the FCU’s past errors and its purported attempts to disseminate the government’s narratives.
Three months down the line, on 6 April, controversy arose again when the IT ministry notified that it would establish a state-appointed body to fact-check government-related content online and that anything deemed as “fake news” could be taken down.
Although the notified amendments to the IT rules have left room for the ministry to notify a fact-checking body, which may or may not be the PIB’s FCU, not much is known about how this unit operates.
Using two RTI responses, one to ThePrint in February and the other to the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) in April, along with PIB’s own FAQs that were uploaded to its website this month, ThePrint explains how this unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) actually works.
Also read: ‘Centre judge & prosecutor in its own cause’ — why Kunal Kamra has challenged amended IT rules in HC
Who is in PIB Fact Check Unit? What is its budget?
The PIB Fact Check Unit is currently run by two officers of the Indian Information Service (IIS) — a joint director and an assistant director. IIS officers are trained to interact with the media. Most ministry spokespersons are IIS officers.
However, in its RTI reply, the PIB did not provide IFF with any information about the criteria followed to appoint specific officers to the FCU. The PIB also replied that there are no “domain experts who will be assessing the officers of the PIB who are appointed” to the PIB FCU.
The FAQs state that the FCU does not take help from any private fact-checkers for its work and has no separate allocated budget. It does not charge anything for fact-checking and does not maintain any record of complainants, that is, people who send in queries for fact checking.
In December 2021, the parliamentary standing committee on communications and information technology released its report on ‘Ethical Standards in Media Coverage’.
In this report, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting submitted that the FCU was established in December 2019 and that such FCUs have been set up in 17 regional offices of the PIB.
What is the PIB Fact Check Unit’s legal status?
The PIB Fact Check Unit’s creation was announced by the PIB in a tweet on 29 November 2019, but ThePrint was not able to find a formal press release from the time.
PIB brings you #PIBFactCheck, an opportunity to partner with us to fight the menace of fake news
Report any news about Central Govt/Dept/Min./Scheme you find suspicious and we will check it out for you
drop an email with the news at the address below 👇 and we will do the rest pic.twitter.com/fLPnDF5yqy
— PIB India (@PIB_India) November 29, 2019
In response to the IFF’s query about “the statutory and institutional mechanism in place to combat fake news” by the FCU, the PIB’s response was that “no such information is available with the Fact Check Unit”.
When the fact-check amendment to the IT Rules was first proposed in January 2023, the IT Ministry had put forth the PIB FCU as the authorised agency to identify content as “fake or false”.
The reference to PIB Fact Check Unit was removed from the notified rules because the law ministry, in its communication to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), pointed out that the PIB Fact Check Unit is not a statutorily recognised body, ThePrint has learnt.
This means that if the PIB Fact Check Unit is dissolved by the MIB in future — which is an easy process because that does not require Parliamentary approval — the rule would have also turned infructuous.
By empowering MeitY to notify a fact check unit through a gazetted notification, even if the PIB Fact Check Unit ceases to exist in the future, the IT Ministry can easily notify another body.
It is unlikely that the FCU can be notified in the next few days, multiple sources told ThePrint.
Moreover, the notified rule has been challenged by comedian Kunal Kamra in the Bombay High Court for exceeding the ambit of the parent law, the Information Technology Act, and for violating the right to freedom of expression, thus causing a chilling effect on free speech.
In its written response to the affidavit filed in the court today, MeitY has called these concerns “imaginary” and far-fetched because it has not yet notified a fact-checking body.
It is understood that multiple people within MeitY expect the Bombay High Court to issue a stay order on this amendment given the merits of Kamra’s petition.
How does the FCU verify information?
In a short, four-sentence response to ThePrint’s February 2023 RTI request about the PIB FCU’s verification process, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting explained the fact-checking process.
The PIB FCU first verifies content using information openly available on government websites, press releases, government social media, and so on.
If that does not work out, the PIB FCU “checks with” the PIB officer who is posted with the concerned ministry. “The authentic information is then posted on social media accounts of the PIB Fact Check Unit,” the response reads.
In the FAQs document uploaded to the PIB’s website on 12 April, 2023, which was not publicised through any of its social media platforms, the PIB has said that the FCU follows the FACT model — find, assess, create, target.
It first “finds” the information that needs to be fact checked. This means it either takes suo motu cognizance of problematic information, or relies on queries received via email, web portal or WhatsApp helpline, or on information from ministries and departments.
After this, it “assesses” whether the received query falls within the ambit of the FCU and then “segregates” the information. Only queries related to the government of India, its ministries, its departments, public sector entities, etc. are taken up by the PIB FCU.
“Any matter that does not pertain to the Union Government is not (sic) taken up for evaluation/fact-checking by the Unit,” the document says. This includes all queries related to the government of India.
The unit “researches” relevant queries using “fact checking tools” and verifies them through information available on government websites, notices, circulars, documents, and e-gazettes. The FAQs do not specify what kind of fact-checking tools are used in the process.
It then “creates” content to be posted on its social media accounts, debunking false or misleading information.
In the last step, “target”, the FCU posts the fact checks on five social media platforms via its official account — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and Koo.
Inspiration for FCU — UK’s disbanded Rapid Response Unit
The FACT model that the PIB FCU uses was developed by the UK’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU) which was created in April 2018 to combat misinformation and “misleading narratives”.
The then head of the RRU, Fiona Bartosch, wrote in a PR Week article in 2018: “Often the stories are flagged directly to Whitehall press offices, which are best placed to assess policy accuracy and respond directly themselves.”
A similar argument has been reiterated multiple times by MeitY Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar — that the government is best placed to counter misinformation about itself.
“If there is any misinformation about the government, then the government must have the ability to tell that person that that is misinformation and please remove it,” Chandrasekhar had said while announcing the notification of the amended rules on 6 April.
In a Twitter Spaces session on 14 April, Chandrasekhar said that the act check unit was conceived of in order to deal with misinformation “directed at the government”.
“Because it is government information and government facts, it cannot be a fact check unit outside the government because they will never have access to information about the government. It needed to be something linked to or within the government that would assist the intermediaries by flagging something which is false,” he said.
The British RRU was based across the British PMO and Cabinet Office and was disbanded in August 2022. It was a team of fewer than 10 staff members and had an annual budget of up to £450,000 (₹4,60,00,000), according to a written reply in the UK Parliament.
For this purpose, the Government Communication Service, the British equivalent of PIB, trained media officers in the British government on the FACT model and gave them secondments to the RRU.
There are a few differences in how the British RRU uses the FACT model and how the PIB FCU has described it in its FAQs.
The British version of the FCU “constantly monitored online news sources and publicly available social media posts” to “find” “themes/discussions/stories” related to the government. It would then “assess” whether it was appropriate to respond to the content and flagged it to relevant press officers with a recommended approach to response.
According to the article written by Bartosch, the British version involved “creating” “appropriate content” to “rebalance the narrative and promote” official government information via a press office line, a social media post, or “the creation of a new asset”.
When asked about the term “new asset”, Wayne Bontoft, senior press officer in the UK Cabinet Office, told ThePrint it referred to “the creation of things such as a quote card or a short animation for social media”.
The British version sought to “target” it to ensure that the government information is “highly visible and accessible to the public”.
Other fact-checkers whose methodology ThePrint checked do not follow this model. This is probably because an independent fact-checker would not have a vested interest in propagating a certain narrative, whereas a government-led fact-checking unit that verifies information about the government has an inherent conflict of interest, especially when the facts portray the government in a negative light.
The aim of an independent fact checker would not be to “rebalance the narrative” or “promote government information”.
Notably, in January this year, Big Brother Watch, a British civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation, released a report claiming that this Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office, and the Counter Disinformation Unit of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport actually monitored and recorded instances of political dissent “under the guise of ‘counter-disinformation’ work”.
A soldier from the British Army’s 77th Brigade claimed that the British government used soldiers from this formation to conduct sentiment analysis of online response to the government’s Covid-19 policies under the garb of scouring social media for disinformation campaigns by adversaries such as China and Russia.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)