Fake news is a deliberate lie or a half-truth circulated with the intention to mislead or cause harm to a section of people. It is a type of yellow journalism that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via the traditional print, broadcasting news media, or via Internet-based social media.

Hate speech is an incitement to hatred against a particular group of persons marginalized by their religious belief, sexual orientation, gender, and so on. The Law Commission, in its 267th report on hate speech, said such utterances have the potential to provoke individuals and society to commit acts of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

Both hate speech and fake news have overlapping areas and are a major threat to peaceful order of the society. Social Media aided by technological advancements has become a major vector of the two phenomenon.

Body

In the age of the internet (WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter,) it is a serious problem as rumors, morphed images, click-baits, motivated stories, unverified information, planted stories for various interests spread easily among 35 crore internet users in India.

Why Hate Speech and Fake News are critical challenges for governments?

• Internal Security: The Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 was triggered by a fake video that incited communal passions. In the West, hate speech combined with fake news on minorities has induced an anti-immigration sentiment (eg : France, Italy, Greece)
• User homophily and Bubble phenomenon: Users with matching political views exchange one-sided information and opinions that suit their own convictions, reinforcing them even further, even if those were based on false information. Eg : Twitter prompts users to follow those who express similar views or posts.
• Igniting extremist sentiments: Fake news’ perpetuates, previously locally found, extremist ideas and groups together dangerously like minded people e.g. – Neo-Nazis in Germany, Separatists in Kashmir.
• Mob lynching: Rumors of child lifting in Jharkhand led to mob lynching on innocent victims.
• Violence: An atmosphere of violence and chaos is created directly or indirectly. The Christchurch Terror attack on a mosque by an extremist was a result of Islamophobia (a direct result of hate speech).
• Misinformation and disinformation due to hate speech and fake news have led to riots as seen in the Delhi Riots case 2020.

Hate Speech and Fake News: A Societal Problem

• Targeted propaganda: Democracy has been reduced to an advertisement campaign. The business conglomerates owned or tied up with political parties influence the views of the people by targeting their audience. Algorithmic filtering have created the cycle of enforcing and reinforcing belief systems and ensuring that we don’t open our minds to diverse opinions.
• Election Manipulation: The issue of fake news has turned out to be a global menace. It has its role in deciding result of elections (Example: USA) to polarization of societies to communal riots to even crumbling the economies. Tolerance and harmony are victims of the new social media age.
• Non-Utilitarian: The anonymity that the internet lends was supposed to aid freedom of speech and, thereby, help democracy thrive. But, political elites have managed to design a grim nexus between anonymity, capital, and technology to influence public opinion, promote political agendas, and disseminate fake and misleading news and information.
• Tools for disharmony: Fake news can divide people based on many fault lines, especially in a diverse country like India. It increases Ghettoization.
• Deep Fake, a new entrant to the arena is even vicious than spreading misinformation. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.

Measures to overcome the menace

• The world’s biggest social media companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and ByteDance, are exploring an industry-wide alliance to curb fake news on their platforms in India.
  • The proposed alliance — to be named the Information Trust Alliance (ITA) — will be a grouping of digital platforms and publishers, fact checkers, civil society and academia that will aim to control the spread of harmful content, including fake news and hate speech.
  • Facebook has announced that it currently has over 500 full-time employees and at least 3,500 external contractors who focus on election work, on top of the 30,000 people across the company focused on safety and security issues.
• Coordinated attempts to amplify and spread misleading and false information sometimes seem to emanate from major political parties and activists who support them. Election Commission of India must tie up with tech companies to identify the creator of such news.
• Educating the end-users to be more discerning consumers of news by informing them of verification tools so that they can ascertain the accuracy of a news item before sharing it.
• Press Council of India, a regulatory body, can warn, admonish or censure the newspaper, the news agency, the editor or the journalist or disapprove the conduct of the editor or the journalist if it finds that a newspaper or a news agency has violated journalistic ethics.
• A better and more effective approach to limit the influence of hoaxes on WhatsApp and other platforms is to increase media literacy.
• The government should bring out a policy framework on the possible harm due to the internet messaging platforms to engage at a deeper level.
• Government of India could partner with local news groups to further educate citizens on how to identify real news from fake news.
• Imposing hefty fines, like in Germany the Social media companies face fines of up to €50m if they persistently fail to remove illegal content from their sites.

Conclusion

Government should have a mechanism for immediately issuing of notice against sites/people/agencies involved in spreading fake news. Secondly, Social media websites should be made accountable of such activities so that it becomes their responsibility to have better control over the spread of fake news. Finally, ordinary consumers of news can play a big role by, first, waking up to the reality that all they read on WhatsApp and Twitter is not the gospel truth, and then, by refusing to pass on what they cannot independently verify with other sources.