Incidents of circulation of “false/fake news” and rumours saw nearly a three-fold rise in 2020, according to NCRB. A total of 1,527 cases of fake news were recorded in 2020 (a 214%increase ) against 486 and 280 cases in 2019 and 2018 respectively. The cases of such fake stories surge invariably when an important event like elections, either for states or centre, takes place. Taking this into account, the Election Commission of India has taken several measures to curb this menace designed to adversely influence the polls or poll prospects of a particular political party.
ECI has set up a dedicated cell to weed out fake news and fake media. The Government of India also does work in close cooperation with it to ensure the election process and people stay uninfluenced by Fake news. A system is up and running on the ECI website to debunk fake news. Dedicated press notes and advisories are issued to aware people about insidious designs of those trying to deliberately deceive or mislead a targeted audience in a particular region, state or at national level, especially through different social media channels.
In March 2022, ECI was even seen in action when it registered an FIR against the fake news hazard talking of EVM hacking by attributing former Chief Election Commission T S Krishnamurthy, and falsely claiming that the former CEC had expressed that a particular party had won assembly elections by hacking EVMs. This fake news was widely being circulated on the social platforms by some miscreants with flagrant vested interests. At times, ECI, also works with social media platforms in identifying and pulling out posts which appear to be fake and have prospects of misleading people at large. The central government is also at an advanced stage, finalising IT related new rules for social media organisations, which would potentially mandate social media platforms to remove such vindictive and spiteful contents within 24 hours. Under the new norms, deployment of technology driven automated tools and mechanisms would also be in place to proactively and timely identify, remove or disable public access to such illegal contents.
Many media houses as well as private initiatives are also in place now to combat fake news menace. These efforts rely on catching a content going viral and putting it to test the authenticity. Though there are multiple AI based methodologies being tried, the most common process is still finding a phone number to speak and verify the source. What is being checked has already gone viral, is an inherent issue with this approach and needs innovation to resolve many deadlocks, huge backlog of pending verifications and making the entire process efficient. The other problem is knowingly or unknowingly leaning to certain political viewpoint rather than keeping this exercise apolitical. This biased fake news busting exercise takes away credibility, thereby seriously damaging the efforts.
Public Broadcaster in India, Prasar Bharati, through DD News (TV), Akashvani Samachar (Radio) and PBNS (Digital) has been combating fake news by running various programs on these media. The efforts have been multiplied for disseminating authentic covid-related information. This has certainly helped in pre-emptively busting the rumour mongering tendencies. Together with the Government’s efforts by disseminating guidelines and running fake news busting exercises by PIB and MyGov, Prasar Bharati is playing a proactive and pivotal role in transparent communication about the disease, vaccines, movement restrictions and other aspects of this combat. Unlike private media however, these efforts have to remain focused on key problems of public domain, while disinformation is a much wider issue. Though, PBNS has been producing social videos of general awareness as well as it’s daily e-magazine namely “PBNS Daily Magazine” covers wider issues too.
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