Breaking down news: The rumours can’t have it

Competing with the headline balderdash about Hardik Patel, Padmavati, Yogi Adityanath, Ravi Shankar Prasad’s sudden affection for Pew Research, “facts” which are pure fiction and television debates about nothing at all, the most interesting news of the week is Rafael Nam’s wire story of WhatsApp market whispers which could be in violation of Sebi guidelines, but whose provenance is hard to trace. It is apparently the fruit of a year’s worth of reporting.

The phenomenon predates WhatsApp, of course. It dates back to the time when the internet was fairly new in India, and people were thinking of inventive and lucrative ways to use it. More than 15 years ago, stockbrokers and punters used to huddle in email mailing lists to trade tips, some of which were surprisingly accurate and at variance with the coverage in the pink papers. A few of these forums were paid for. Email, being an open text medium, was open to snoopers, but that may not have mattered at a time when insider trading rules were fairly lax. They were tightened a couple of years ago, and WhatsApp’s encryption is useful.

Market whispers coexist with legitimate coverage of the markets, and media faces a similar problem — consumers have to differentiate between credible coverage and incredible claims, which are funnelled to them by the same social media platforms. A loss of faith in media is being reported from all over the world.

On Thursday, a project to make media more transparent and credible was launched by the Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The Trust Project was initiated three years ago, well before the fake news pandemic began, and was initially funded by craigslist founder Craig Newmark. It has some fine mastheads on board, like The Washington Post, The Economist, the Italian La Reppublica and La Stampa, and the German wire service DPA. Online services like Google, Bing, Twitter and Facebook, which have become the last-mile pipes for news, are external partners.

The project has developed a system of tags and schemas which explain the methodology of journalists, cite their sources and establish their credentials. Along with that, the mission and funding of their organisation, its commitment to ethics and diversity, and methods of responding to consumers of news, are set out. The tagging system is meant to be embedded in the content management systems (CMSes) used to publish news.

The system is being compared to the nutrition label on packaged food — users know exactly what they’re getting. Tags developed in collaboration with Schema.org, the organisation focused on making taxonomic sense of the internet in a manner that is universally meaningful. It remains to be seen how well the delightfully unstructured news business will play with it. But it — or a similar future mechanism — would eventually succeed, because it responds to a real need.

While search engines and social media are incorporating their own means for vetting news, maybe making a trust system available to users would help. This week, for instance, BJP IT cells chief Amit Malviya shared a collage of Jawaharlal Nehru with various women. Being more interested in making and re-making history rather than studying it, he failed to notice that one of the women depicted was Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit.

It was called out right away, but wouldn’t it have been more effective if the thread started by Malviya were itself tagged as inauthentic? That is the way Wikipedia self-corrects, and its system gives the reader enough flags to estimate the authenticity of the content. Without it, Wikipedia would not have been able to publish authentically on divisive subjects like politics and religion.

But then, would it make a difference? These days, anything goes. We have had a brouhaha half a week long over Hardik Patel’s sex tape — which is so remarkably devoid of sex that it would be cleared without a thought by the Central Board of Film Certification. The peddling of this tape as a “sex scandal” only shows that the BJP has no idea what either word means.