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Goebbel's digital industry in India

Kashmir Times. Dated: 11/14/2018 10:41:46 AM

There is method in the mad tsunami of fake news in circulation, not just innocence and ignorance

The threat of fake news across the globe, including in India, has been recognised for quite some time as a potential challenge and apprehensions have been raised from time to time about the right wing push in propelling this fake news industry that is proliferating through social media and WhatsApp messages. Now an authentic well researched report by the BBC has endorsed that the ultra-nationalistic discourse is a driving force behind the fake news flooding India. The research has also found that the eco-system of this fake news is maintained by Twitter handles of users with pro-BJP affiliations. The analysis suggested that right wing networks are much more organized in pushing these fake nationalistic stories and that the emotional desire to bolster a national identity played a crucial role in by-passing facts. The Hindu right wing has found its own improvised version of Nazi Germany's Goebbels and has perfected it to the hilt in a digital world. Unlike the pain-staking efforts of Goebbellian machinery that worked through constant repetition of lies, all that this Indian version of the propaganda machinery needs is a fake news Tsunami in the digital world circulated in bulk with just the press of a button. Within minutes, it is difficult to keep tabs on the vast corners it has reached. It spreads by hundreds and thousands as nationalism inspired bigots as well as agenda-less gullible people circulate it in thousands in a matter of seconds without bothering to verifying the source. The BBC research has found that screenshots and stories with minimal texts were the preferred method of sharing news stories, making it difficult for lazy users to verify the news before they start believing it and share it with many others.
Though the high circulation of fake news has been in the public domain for quite some time, the fresh research adds some authenticity to the knowledge. The research is of immense significance and concern in a country like India, where a flooding of social media messages have been the origin of spread of anti-Muslim hatred and also lead to heinous crimes like lynchings. The price war that is driving down the cost of the mobile phone data service and making 3G internet service accessible to even the poorest members of the society also points out to the possibility of a deliberate nexus between the Hindu right wing and the corporate giants and hints at a deliberate mechanism to disinform the public in a bigger way. There is no way to find this out but the otherwise existence of stark gaps in providing access to basic necessities to the poor other than the digital connectivity does arouse suspicions about the possibility of there being ulterior motives behind the project of making private communication easier for millions of people in a country of otherwise many disparities and a country bogged with its teeming dispossessed millions. The larger question, however, is how to arrest this trend. The BJP government which patronises an organized army of trolls and in whose hands the fake news phenomenon is a boon has shown not even meagre interest in checking fake news, except in using its bogey to counter every news that its party and politicians are uncomfortable with. That the government uses all its resources to push for the appointment of a rabid right wing ideologue, known for his acerbic and communally poisonous tweets as well as for his plagiarized body of work, as honorary faculty to Jawaharlal Nehru University is only one indication of which side this government butters its bread on the issue of vitriolic and false digital data. The Goebbellian propaganda is designed to its benefit. Its interest lies in keeping this giant well fed. The digital media groups like the WhatsApp and Twitter have expressed their helplessness and profess to have started online awareness campaigns to minimize the extent of fake news circulation. The non-seriousness of such efforts is betrayed by the recent visit of Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey, who said not a peep about specific plans to counter such huge scale of misinformation through its site. In such a scenario, the onus falls on the professional media and responsible citizens to counter the false narratives with truth. But for the latter to win this war against falsehoods, the commitment to truth and information needs to be much more than the passion for unleashing a politically and communally motivated propaganda.