Event reports
The rise of right-wing populism in the past years has not only supported the spread of false information, but even lead to the lack of belief of many in reliable, scientific sources. It is during these days that journalists seek to expand their knowledge on news, image and video verification tools in order to dismantle misinformation and create reliable sources of news.
Against this backdrop, WAN-IFRA, and the India office of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung jointly hosted a workshop on “Combating Misinformation and Fake News” on 17th-18th September at the Leela Hotel in Gurgaon, National Capital Region. After the workshop “Building a Newsroom Culture” that was held in Mumbai in February this year, it was the second event that was jointly organized by WAN-IFRA and the KAS India office.
Magdoom Mohamed, Managing Director of WAN-IFRA South Asia, kicked off the workshop by welcoming the participants comprising of journalists, academia and representatives of media companies, while stressing on the immense importance of addressing such topic at the current time. Two very experienced teachers from Alt News, an Indian fact-checking website launched in 2017, were onboard to lead the sessions: Pratik Sinha, co-founder and author at Alt News, and Jignesh Patel, researcher and writer at Alt News.
Pratik Sinha began the first session on the “State of Misinformation” of India. While it is widely believed that false information only affects people who own a mobile phone and hence have access to social media and messengers like WhatsApp, fake news also spread through “word of mouth”. He additionally addressed the relations between the technical circumstances of the mobile market and user behavior. Monthly internet data usage grew exponentially with the market entry of Jio in 2016, making India one of the countries with the cheapest prices for mobile data. What`s more, types of misinformation have to be differentiated in their related subject areas, e.g. economic or political misinformation.
A common example of circulation of fake news in India are child kidnapping cases, where videos or photos are either morphed, or simply put into a wrong context so that people may be falsely accused of a crime they haven`t committed.
Another event that triggered a wave of fake news in India were the Balakot-attacks in February 2019 where old videos and pictures of destroyed premises have been shared, stating that these were artefacts of the latest attacks by the Indian Air Force on Pakistan-based terror camps.
In the following sessions, the participants examined images by themselves. Tools that they were taught included among others how to trace back the origin of a photo, their date of creation or their original context. While platforms like Google Reverse Image Search offer important features, human observation stays significant to the process. The same goes for the video verification, where search engines play a significant tool in fact-checking, yet they are only an auxiliary agent in the search for truth.
On the second day of the workshop, topics of “Finding Viral Content” and “Search Strategies for Different Platforms” were addressed. Next to practical advices about search platforms that operate out of different countries as alternatives to Google–like Russian Yandex or Chinese Baidu- or the YouTube DataViewer which offers an objective review of videos, discussions evolved on the truth-finding process in the internet and the right course of action with fake news. Questions also concerned the credibility of sources on the web.