walks of life including teachers, retired servicemen, retired army/policemen, student leaders, lawyers etc. Accordingly, each police station will have a Whatsapp group with 250 members. So if we multiply 250 into 1469, the state will have approximately 3,67,00 digital volunteers, helping curb fake news. Their role would be to inform the police about any incident or people who are spreading fake news and misinformation on social media.
Step 4: Forming a tech army
While the government is doing its bit to curb fake news, many other professionals have joined in for good. 22-year-old Lyric Jain, who is the founder of a UK based startup called Logically, has developed a machine learning algorithm which can examine fact from fiction. Here’s how it works. After sifting through all the top and biggest news stories, it highlights the features that make them fake. Like the headline, tone of the story, bias, inaccurate statistics etc.
Remember the news headlines which read the 2,000 rupee note being embedded with a ‘nano GPS chip’? Well, that was a fake news story which was first brought to light by Pankaj Jain, the founder of verification site SM Hoax Slayer. He began small by responding to messages to tell people that the message they are passing were not true and then he decided to take his cause further. On average he started getting over 150 messages from people every day, enquiring about the news content they receive on the mobile messaging service WhatsApp. Till date, he has debunked 1,300 fake forwards on Whatsapp. Likewise, a team of computer science experts from IIT, Delhi are developing an app which will be able to flag the fake news messages. The app will be able to colour code the messages – green for legit content and red for fake news.
Step 5: Sensitising the youth
Being a netizen, we’re already a part of the fake news menace and have no choice but to deal with it’s implications. However, we can hope to secure the entire generation ahead by sensitising them about fake news right from their education level.
The district of Kunnur in Kerala witnessed a plethora of fake news incidents. From hyping the entire Nipah virus outbreak to claiming vaccination as harmful, which actually deterred many parents from getting their children vaccinated. That’s when an IAS officer from that district, Mir Mohammed Ali started an initiative called Satyameva Jayate. Under this initiative, training will be given to high school students to identify fake news, inculcate the need to question the authenticity of information they receive, understand the psychology behind people sharing information, introduce them to concepts like filter bubble and click bait. He started by training 150 teachers who will pass on the training to the students. They were also urged to Google and look up for authentic news sources. He further states that he wants the students to teach their parents as well, who are the ones easily gullible and forward messages without verification. This is happening around the world, where the educators are adopting a curriculum which teaches kids to distinguish facts from fiction. The curriculum was designed by an NGO called New Literacy Project which includes 12 lessons on fake news.
Sure, we are doing our bit to curb this menace, but there is a lot more India can learn from countries around the world. For instance, Malaysia has a law against fake news which makes it punishable and imposes a fine upto $1, 23,000 for the same. Germany fines social media networks if they fail to remove hateful posting and fake news. While France’s media legislation will soon see a complete overhaul in their media legislation. Compared to these stringent measures, we clearly need to up our game.