From left: The Indian Express deputy editor Seema Chishti, co-founder of Altnews.in Pratik Sinha; director general of IIMC KG Suresh; managing editor of Boom Jency Jacob, South Asia bureau chief of The Washington Post Annie Gowen, and contributing editor of Business Standard Vanita Kohli Khandekar at the event in New Delhi on Wednesday. Express Photot by Amit Mehra
In this edition of iethinc, held in New Delhi on March 21, panellists discussed how the media goes about its job under the spectre of fake news, how it checks on facts, and what role the government and the public have to play. Among the suggestions made was that an “army” of people has to be created to crack fake news.
Pratik Sinha, co-founder of the website Alt News; K G Suresh, Director General of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication; Jency Jacob, Managing Editor of fact-check website Boom; Annie Gowen, South Asia Bureau Chief of The Washington Post; and Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, Contributing Editor of Business Standard, were the panellists who discussed “Uncovering the Truth in the Time of Fake News”. The discussion was moderated by Seema Chishti, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express. Edited excerpts:
Seema Chishti: You try to bust fake news. Given the technology today, the dark Internet, social media, secret messages coming on my phone, can that ever be busted?
Pratik Sinha (Alt News): At Alt News, we mainly look at three kinds of fake news — if a politician is saying something from the podium, if mainstream media is giving out some information that is not true, and Hindu-Muslim kind of fake news; minorities could be shown in a bad light [which] can aid majoritarian politics. The challenge is that fake news continues to be viral for 24 hours, for 72 hours, depending on how provocative it is. We have had 8 million views over the last one year, but that is a small number. We need more organisations to help us with this endeavour as it needs to reach out to as many people as possible; especially rural India. We need cross-functional organisations to create tools and education material so that we don’t have another Jharkhand where a WhatsApp rumour can lead to killing of people…
Read | Need to raise army of people to bust fake news: Panel at ExpressThinc
You train students to make out the difference between fake and real news. How tough is your battle?
K G Suresh (IIMC): The tendency is to associate fake news with online media, to which I disagree. There is fake news in mainstream media too. There are primarily three reasons for it. It could be due to the presence of paid news where an unsuccessful rally is projected as successful, or an unsuccessful candidate could be projected as succeeding — that I categorise as fake news. I see media polarised as never before, there is propaganda and counter-propaganda; mainstream media is also seen to be lapping it up. Third, in our own profession, the accuracy, the fact-checking, the field work etc — we have done away with it. As we are chasing news 24 × 7, we are not giving news time enough as it requires to be given. For me, fake news is a big blot, a threat to society. But as a media educator, the advent of fake news has made it easier to tell my students to go back to media ethics. Now they are able to relate to it and not see it as a moral science class.
Is it possible to fact-check and get news across at even half the speed at which fake news does the rounds?
Jency Jacob (Boom): Yes, we can do it. The vindication of what we were doing over the last year came [with] a very small report that many missed. — that Priyanka Gandhi was running a ‘war room’, fact-checking every speech that was being delivered. That, according to me, was vindication of the work we had done. We have gone after politicians with a vengeance. If there is merit in what they are saying, we have gone after data. I am sorry to say that I have seen journalists are uncomfortable with data. We are scared of data as we were never trained how to analyse data. It’s important as it could give you stories that may not come out otherwise. In the last one year, we have shown it is perfectly possible to fact-check every bit of news that comes up. We need to be responsible on fact-checking on social media and WhatsApp before randomly sharing things with all others. Mainstream media cannot say this is not our job and we have greater things to do.
Is there a difference in the way you see fake news being disseminated, accepted or not accepted in India and what’s happening in the US?
Annie Gowen (The Washington Post): The situation in Asia is different than it is in the US. With the Rohingya crisis, a lot of what happened there was fermented on social media and you had Aung San Suu Kyi’s information minister put out on his Facebook, Twitter accounts that Rohingya were burning down their own houses. It’s even more a problem to figure out how to promote literacy among people who are coming to Internet for first time. In 2014, when I went to Myanmar for the first time, no one had a cellphone and suddenly they opened up the market. Now almost all have a mobile phone, some of them think the Internet is Facebook. I have been in India since 2013, when fake news was just starting. So it is an evolving problem, especially acute here, unlike in the West where people were already digitally native when they got this technology, so there was a little more discernment. But we have our President now who routinely talks about fake news and that may or may not be fake news. We need to deal with this: how news institutions are trying to put out the truth in a very charged environment.
You have been studying media, more than a century of media in India. How new is fake news?
Vanita Kohli Khandekar (Business Standard): We do understand what fake news does to democracy and to the idea of freedom of expression. My job has been to follow the money and I have done that with business and the entertainment business and that’s the way I have tried to approach the fake news business. If you follow the money, you can tackle it 50-70 %. I don’t know how many of you know of these kids sitting in Macedonia who influenced the 2016 US elections by simply putting out stuff like ‘Bill Clinton goes under pressure, admits he is a murderer’; ‘Hillary is a paedophile’… These got traction. There is a whole economy behind it, which must be attacked to attack the entire fake news. For example, in 2013 in UK, a guy named Mike Weatherley, an MP, was a special IP (intellectual property) adviser to David Cameron, as the creative industry is very strong; they were trying to control piracy and launched a special IP unit in the police. They did these two papers on piracy and education, search engines and piracy, and started talking to various platforms. The biggest suggestion was to co-opt the platforms into de-ranking piracy sites, make it difficult for them to get advertising revenues. Fake news makes us [mainstream media] lose money, lose audiences. As Weatherly put it, it’s education, carrot and stick. It’s a long-term thing, about prevention. In India, media literacy is abysmally low and not talked about. We have to be careful as people believe the printed word, word from news channels. Our institutional frameworks are rubbish.
An MIT study found that fake news spreads faster than genuine news…
Pratik Sinha: There is a Ukrainian-American company called MGID; every fake news site you go to, you have nude, semi-nude pictures served by MGID. We had written to them with evidence that these are fake news sites, articles to be busted as fake news; you guys are enabling it. Their response was ‘we don’t look at content’. So advertisers themselves have a business model where they are promoting such shady websites.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: I don’t know how true it is but I spoke to several ad networks who said porn, hate-speech top the list while fake news comes a little below. So media literacy is not just for the audience but for advertisers, for the industry. And the industry needs to be demonetised.
Is that not exactly what he is saying, that this shadow industry develops precisely because of these taboos?
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: So push them down, de-rank them.
Jency Jacob: That’s the dichotomy that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google face as they don’t want to be identified as publishers as then the problem of regulating content comes. So, if you are a platform, how do you address this question? That’s where lies the confusion for them too.
Pratik Sinha: Facebook, Twitter let you put information but advertising is separate altogether. In advertising, they are enabling them financially. For example, Google AdSense will not allow ads on some sites; postcard.news has AdSense if I am not wrong. But there are a ton of small ad networks that are allowing these websites to make a ton of money. There is an L-shaped office in Noida where 15-20 young people sit and create dozens of Facebook pages: I support Indian Army, I support A Doval, I support Sehwag etc etc. They have millions of followers, they push the content through these, get the audience, get ad clicks and make enough money to pay the youngsters.
Is it possible for India to go through the regulatory path Vanita is suggesting?
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: I am saying executing networks.
K G Suresh: I am in favour of these platforms developing algorithms which take care of many of these problems. When social media platforms came, the idea was not to regulate. Regulation is a dangerous word I am not in favour of. Media literacy should go down to the school level and awareness for even journalists at district or lower levels should increase. As regards regulation within the purview of law, IPC, CrPC on obscenity etc are already there. Specific framework only for regulation of media, I think, can be misused.
Media literacy sounds great but is it possible in the medium to short term to make people media-literate and then engage?
Annie Gowen: As I said earlier, in the US kids are digitally native. It is something they can start teaching at schools. They would learn what is a fake photo, a real photo etc. Europe is starting to educate high schools on it.
What is disturbing in this MIT study is not bots being put to use, but people reaching out to fake news and sharing it.
Jency Jacob: In India, you don’t need bots. If you look at political parties and their leaders, there are valid followers of political parties. How much does it take to trend a hashtag. It’s easy to get 70-80 handles. Twitter is cracking down on many bots. But when you are willing to polarise society and use the vilest of abuses on Twitter which you may not use if you meet them face to face… They do it on these platforms as they are willing to take a stand on ideologies they believe in. These people are completely invested in the process. They may not do it merely for financial reasons but for their ideological leanings towards a political party. They believe in it truly. Boom has started a training division for school, college students. Last week, we did a workshop with US Consulate in Mumbai and what stood out was that a journalism student said that for the last few years she has been studying journalism and why was this never taught. We are planning to take this as a national campaign.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: They [MIT study] say it’s human nature to look for things that repel and disgust us more, so we amplify it more. If you look at television, everyone says they go by ratings. But ratings are a reflection, the fact is that people are watching it.
K G Suresh: The kind of news, especially in regional areas, saying the world is coming to an end on such a day etc are ridiculous stories doing the rounds. That’s being lapped up. Mainstream is showing that. Education is the key here.
Pratik Sinha: The study says people go out for fake news, but in the Indian context, I have an example: take a picture, put a quote and put it on social media and they [the fake quotes] garner a huge number of likes, shares; especially if it is a celebrity picture.
In a difficult election year ahead, where we see society as polarised, will we be capable of dealing with something like the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook mess that has erupted in the US? What would India do, if we have people manipulating fake news?
Pratik Sinha: Every day, we do a certain amount of stories which is only 5% of the fake news that is there. We let go 95% as we don’t have the bench strength to do it. If manipulating fake news is being done as was done in the US, we are definitely not equipped for it.
Jency Jacob: Many advertisers are brands. Let’s look at plastic rice, the rice brands, or the chocolate brands; what we are doing is we are speaking to them and telling them the impact of fake news on them. On every story we busted, we see their sales were hit when these stories were going on WhatsApp. Think about the kind of websites you are putting your money in. Is there a way to partner with people and take the message across? And there are several companies that have got in touch with us as they want to do campaigns to use the reach they have to take the message across that there is something called fake news and be aware of what is being shared on social media.
K G Suresh: We ought to prepare an army of people to crack this whole thing.
How will the ‘army’ be created?
K G Suresh: It has to be created at our level.
Annie Gowen: You have BJP creating 10,000 WhatsApp groups for UP. What’s going to be the counter of that?
When a minister shares something [on Stephen Hawking] that later comes out as fake, how do we deal with it?
K G Suresh: He is the Science and Technology Minister, a doctor, so we can understand what happens to an ordinary mortal. And this reflects the gravity of the situation. We have to be vigilant about fake news as it is a phenomenon that has potential for devastation .
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: 70% of the digital advertising revenues in the US go to Google & Facebook. It’s true for India also. They make money from the photos, videos, thoughts you share. They are making money out of it, so they have to be treated like an Indian Express, Times of India etc. Anybody, it is your job to ensure that it is not libellous, factually correct… Second, we should have a system of rating for consumers to identify that these are credible news. We can have this for media brands, just as you know this is what star hotel, till our education upgrades in this morass of information.
Pratik Sinha: Facebook, Google, they are trying to puncture the bubble. When we see our Facebook timelines are filled with news of one kind, adhering to one ideology, what they are trying is to give related articles with different views. Secondly, Google in the US has come up with the meta tag. Let’s say Trump says something and PolitiFact fact-checks it, Trump’s article will come and PolitiFact’s article will be up-ranked, so PolitiFact will be right next to Trump’s article. Essentially Google, instead of trying to regulate content, gives more sets of views and not just one kind of view.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: I am not talking of regulating the content we put. Checks and balances that an Indian Express or a Business Standard applies on its content are the same checks and balances…
Pratik Sinha: But The Indian Express is creating the content. Facebook is not creating content.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: Facebook is soliciting the content. It’s like saying ISPs. There is a difference between ISPs & Facebook.
Seema Chishti: That is the big debate the European Union is trying to settle by branding them as publishers. Germany has a law on it, which EU is planning to emulate. You say you are not the publisher but you do publish and make money out of it.
Audience questions
Cyril (International Center for Journalists): How much of this is being driven by personalisation and ad technology?
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: I think a lot is being so driven. It has happened due to the amount of customisation available. If I am a liberal living in a liberal ghetto, when I come out I am so shocked by people’s leanings that there is no serendipity in news consumption. One information product in common could be consumed by the entire nation for avoiding splintering. A historian of journalism told me people of a country should consume at least one common newspaper. By not doing so, we are polarising ourselves.
Venkatesh (International Center for Journalists): Why don’t media organisations bust fake news?
Seema Chishti: We tell factually correct, socially relevant stories. We are perhaps doing it in a larger philosophical way by doing accurate good stories. But yes, we don’t go out and bust every fake news there is. The way we do our journalism, we do a lot of busting of fake news.
KG Suresh: Some channels are doing it
Vanita K Khandekar: BBC is doing it.
Ashmita (Quint): Quint, Boom, all these are busting fake news. How feasible is it for mainstream media, local channels etc to bust fake news? How does YouTube tackle fake news?
Pratik Sinha: There was news that Gurmehar Kaur was in a car and was dancing, but it was a fake video, it was not her dancing. If you type that again, you will not find it as YouTube took it down.
Jency Jacob: When I came to Boom, we had a tie-up with Reuters and some international footage of them to mix three snippets. We had three occasions when we got a strike. We used some music that violated some of their copyrights. If you go to YouTube and check the kind of violations that the number of random channels put out, they go copy-content from anywhere, etc. I have asked YouTube we got a strike for something as simple as music that we didn’t realise has a copyright on that. Where are your systems when it comes to these videos being put out? Also before Sridevi passed away, there is a 1½-minute clip with 2 million views with no verification on its authenticity. YouTube is probably watching copyright more.
K G Suresh: If you have programmes like Truth vs Hype and others, the print media can devote a certain section.. .
Pratik Sinha: It’s the need of the hour. It could be a journalistic duty.
K G Suresh: Somewhere, a perception is created that mainstream media is suppressing real news due to corporate or other interests and so people are going to local news.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: What is mainstream media in India? I think we are a heterogeneous group and the most read newspaper is Dainik Jagaran. Would you call it mainstream? It is not so for this audience. In our head it is NDTV, The Times of India.
K G Suresh: But people have the perception that mainstream media suppresses news. When a tycoon’s son died in an accident, people came to such a conclusion.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: So mainstream media has also become propogandist in that sense. There is a difference between outright lies, prejudiced lies, errors and bad reporting or bad editing, but it does not mean errors happen all the time. Fake news is motivated and is being factory-manufactured.
Sevanti Ninan (thehoot.org): What is the role of government in this scenario?
Jency Jacob: I would love to see Smriti Irani walk the talk. We will send her a list of 50-100 websites that campaign, do propaganda for BJP, to see what she does about that. It’s nice to say we want regulation, but can they start it within their own party?
Pratik Sinha: Even if they bring out regulation, they will be very selective about it.
K G Suresh: I think it is more about rhetoric than regulation. I don’t think parties will go for regulation post Emergency, they have learnt it the hard way.
Khemta Jose (Quint): What is the substantive difference between fake news and propaganda?
Jency Jacob: Global fact-checkers drive down not to use the term fake news. In our own definition our indicators are stuff put out unintentionally whereas others do it maliciously.
Pratik Sinha: People treat WhatsApp as an extension of newspapers these days.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: Classify propaganda as prejudiced news; others are error of judgment, deliberate errors.
Ishita (student): As students, how do we tackle fake news?
K G Suresh: In our curriculum, we have introduced fake news, post-truths etc. I am sure you are being taught how to identify fake news. Whoever comes to know of fake news, must expose it. Checking, cross-checking, having multiple sources, I think we need to go back to the field and spot reporting .
Jency Jacob: We are trying to democratise the processes we are involved in, tools used, doing reverse-image search etc. You read a few of our articles and find out how to detect it.
Vanita Kohli Khandekar: I discovered numeracy was a challenge to a lot of journalists. Within business journalism, I have had trainees that could not do percentages. So I asked, how big is Instagram? It was not to question him but just to get cognisant of the basic fact: before you believe in anything, question everything.