If the Modi government was serious about fake news it would adopt a no-tolerance policy on all fronts, including its own IT cells and party leaders.
IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s has issued an order for social media platforms: Curb fake news with technology. But he conveniently skipped the fact that the BJP government’s beloved Digital India project can be a factory of fake news.
Prasad said fake news being circulated and re-circulated to “create crimes” in India will “not be acceptable.” And he’s sternly told them that there have to be technological solutions because “it does not need rocket science to identify lakhs of messages being circulated on a particular day, in a particular area of a particular state.”
Lakhs of messages being circulated on a particular day in a particular state? That just sounds like a good day’s work for the BJP’s IT cell.
If it could, the BJP would have tech solutions for everything from Swachh Bharat to demonetisation to female foeticide. After all, it wants to convert the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of information technology into a “digitally empowered society and knowledge economy” with one Aadhaar to bind them all.
Also read: 31 deaths later, WhatsApp is yet to be serious about fighting fake news in India
A fake photograph of Rahul Gandhi checking out pictures of scantily clad women on his phone has been shared by the convener of the BJP IT cell in Jamnagar, an account followed by Narendra Modi, Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman, according to Altnews.
There have been countless examples of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘original’ tweets, many from ministers, MPs and MLAs of the ruling party, all with the same language and sometimes even the same typos. Paresh Rawal once mistakenly tweeted out a Google document on #JhoothiCongress about the duplicity of the Congress party. Unfortunately, that was actually the internal strategy document of the BJP itself with suggested tweets in English and Hindi to make the#JhoothiCongress hashtag trend on Twitter. Ravi Shankar Prasad was going to lead the charge. Alas, as Altnews noted, Rawal jumped the gun and revealed all the ‘original’ tweets. When Narendra Modi was in campaign mode, BJP karyakartas shared the famous picture of a young Modi sweeping the floor during his early RSS days to emphasise his humble origins. It turned out to be a cleverly morphed picture but at no point did Modi disavow it when it was going viral.
It’s not that other parties are without sin, but the BJP is the master of using social media to spread its message. It was way ahead of all the other parties in the tech game. That includes fake or fake-ish news as well. Now the genie is out of the bottle. That genie is killing people based on rumours of child traffickers and kidnappers, and the government wants a technological solution for the Frankenstein’s monster it helped nurture and grow.
When communal riots broke out in Basirhat, the BJP’s Mahila Morcha V-P Geeta Kapoor shared a picture of a bleeding couple as a photograph of the teenager whose Facebook post triggered the violence. That photograph was really from Bangladesh. BJP IT head Amit Malviya shared a picture of violence in Bengal’s Nadia without saying it was from 2015. BJP leaders like Nupur Sharma and Swapan Dasgupta shared the picture of a burning vehicle as part of the #SaveBengal protest campaign. The deadly irony was it was a New York Times picture from the Gujarat riots of 2002. Vijeta Malik, state executive member of Haryana BJP shared a picture of a woman being assaulted on the streets of Basirhat. It was really from a Bhojpuri film, Aurat Khilona Nahin.
When their part in spreading fake news was pointed out, not a single one apologised or express any contrition with a handful like Nirmala Sitharaman being honourable exceptions. Some quietly deleted the tweet. Others resorted to whataboutery or doubled down basically saying the end justified the means. Nupur Sharma said (defiantly) that she just forwarded a flyer she had received and “this has woken up people in Lutyen’s Delhi who have maintained a stoic silence till now.”
Tech and social media companies should do their part in combating fake news and we can definitely argue that they do not do enough, that they are slow to respond, that a one-size-fits-all definition of freedom of expression does not work across cultures as they found out in Sri Lanka where as the New York Times reported, a country can be a tinderbox and Facebook the match. Facebook memes about Muslim plots to wipe out the Buddhist majority went viral but Times reported that Facebook officials “ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact.” Paroma Roy Chowdhury writes that while companies like Google are trying out automated tools like Conversation AI to spot digital harassment, “none of the social media platforms can be proactively monitored due to the sheer volume of content generated”.
Also read: Here’s what the world is doing to tackle fake news. India can learn
There are 6,000 tweets every second on an average. That’s 500 million tweets a day. But when the IT ministry warned WhatsApp to “take immediate action to end this menace”, Roy Chowdhury also wrote, “Fake news and deaths caused by it have more to do with the lack of legal recourse and the deterioration of law-and-order situations than with technology.” And the government’s willingness to turn a blind eye or maintain a discreet silence is because they can reap the political dividend from the rumour. The leadership’s silence, over and over again, during cattle lynching stories based on WhatsApp rumours, spoke volumes. And in case anyone missed it, union minister Jayant Sinha went and garlanded those accused of lynching.
If the government was serious about fake news it would adopt a no-tolerance policy on fake news on all fronts including its own IT cells and party leaders big and small. Accountability is the key here and it’s very convenient to pass that buck to the social media companies. Or demand a technological solution that does not get the government’s hands dirty. But accountability, like charity, has to begin at home.
Sandip Roy is a journalist, commentator and author.