Fake it till you make it .
Social media, apparently, loves this catchphrase. Swaying political opinion, influencing consumer interests, or just trolling a section of population, fake news items are manufactured to serve various purposes. It’s everywhere, and chances are that you may have fallen for one too.
The democracy and openness of the web has made internet greatly accessible. Content is being distributed with negligible censorship. Okay, yes, there are exceptions.
According to estimates, 136 million Indians are active on social media. Independent studies have shown that over 60% of Indian journalists use social platforms as a news source.
Social media has become an impulsive source to share and seek information. Fake news has exploited this vast network of virtual citizens to push propaganda and mislead audiences.
In the post-truth age, how do you scroll through your feed and ignore the weed? Social media platforms are also contemplating a slew of measures to help ward off ‘alternative facts’ and strengthen trust on the websites.
Here’s a quick roll call.
Fighting Fakery on Facebook
There are 166 million Facebook users in India, which is more than the population of Russia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand combined. That’s a fact, but not everything on your Facebook feed might be.
Though people ‘socialising’ virtually may be a good thing, the figure is a bit concerning for the same reasons as planning a zoo inside your house – the sheer size of the ecosystem, and a certain potential for events to go out of control if not monitored well. After all, not everybody’s posting cat videos.
Facebook probably understands the problem fake news poses to the credibility of the platform. It has identified pages that have been posting fake news and those sources would be seen less frequently in news feeds. The social media platform has released a slew of measures to counter the propagation of fake news. For starters, Facebook has launched a fake news flagging tool.
Here’s How Facebook Intends to Not Become Fakebook
- Facebook will provide a new option where a user can mark any suspicious item as ‘fake news’. Facebook will assess if the source of flagged stories is a legitimate media organisation or a proxy site.
- Facebook has enlisted select third-party fact-checkers — Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, the AP, and Politifact – members of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network.
- It will mark the questionable content as “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers,” with an option to read more about it. If users try to share the post anyway, they’ll be reminded again that third-party fact checkers dismissed it.
In April 2017, Facebook has announced that it plans to pay independent fact-checkers to keep a tab on news and distorted information. The proposal would make fact checking – a resource-intensive activity – much more economically viable, and therefore a lucrative option.
Wondering What's up on WhatsApp?
Do you wake up to a deluge of ‘Gud mrng 4 a butiful day’ from annoying relatives on WhatsApp? Sadly, that’s not the scariest part of this instant messaging platform.
Two hundred million people actively use WhatsApp in India every month. WhatsApp has given free and unlimited multimedia messaging access in hands of these millions. While a few are happy sending those pesky ‘morning greetings’, there’s another set of users working to promote a ‘farrago of distortions and misrepresentations’.
Whether GPS chip in the new 2000 rupee note or ‘Baahubali’ Prabhas donating Rs 121 crore to martyrs, WhatsApp fanned a lot of fake news and pushed it to the mainstream.
In a closed ecosystem, where the message gets forwarded from a person in your contact list, and therefore a person you would usually trust, you tend to believe what’s on WhatsApp. All of this propagated by the lack of a proper framework to tackle fake news on the platform.
Though Facebook owns WhatsApp, the company has announced nothing specifically dedicated to check fake news on the messaging platform.
The maximum you can do is report the message or the user to WhatsApp by the following procedure. Tap on ‘Settings’, then navigate to ‘Help’, and click ‘Contact Us’
Here’s an illustrated example. Click on WhatsApp menu, and you’ll get options like these:
Your profile details would be visible. At the bottom of the list, you’ll find ‘Help’. Tap on it.
Then tap on ‘Contact us’ to open a submission form.
The form looks something like this, with an option to attach screenshots. Fill it with the details, and submit it.
Get Going on Google
You must’ve had a teacher in school that’d not punish students themselves, but instead nominate class ‘monitors’ to do so. This effectively kept the teacher clear of any negative reactions, and students more vigilant. Google is that class teacher in the classroom, that is, the internet.
This year, Google predicts internet users in India to cross 500 million users. And Google, being the unofficial slang for internet search, would hope to retain the title and the users. On the basis of keywords, Google’s search crawls millions of pages on the internet and furnishes results – automated by an algorithm. The process is repeated for at least 3.5 billion searches per day, including my occasional queries about ‘how to identify which side of the USB will fit’.
To keep these searches safe is a daunting task indeed. In 2016, Google permanently banned nearly 200 publishers from its AdSense advertising network to choke off websites that try to deceive users.
The search giant has also released a new tool called ‘Fact Check’. When enabled, news stories deemed questionable come with fact-checking tags in Google’s search results. The tab shows the claimed facts in the stories and also states whether it was found to be true or false. Google won’t verify the claims on its own, but rope in third-party fact-checkers websites.
Currently, this seems to be working for US based publications only, but Google plans to expand it across the globe.
Google is also asking its online content monitors to look at actual real search requests to identify “offensive" content — and then rate those results.
The quality raters’ findings won’t change Google results, but the findings will be used to improve search algorithms. That means their data ‘might have an impact on low-quality pages that are spotted by raters’, as well as on others that weren’t reviewed.
Tumultuous Turf of Twitter
With over 23 million users, Twitter is virtually a trending topic among Indians. It’s a modern place for celeb-spotting, consumer complaints and random trolls. It also serves as a platform where Indians can complain about a refrigerator to the Minister of External Affairs. Yes, that easy.
Sushma Swaraj responded with this tweet:
As of now, the microblogging site has a tweet-length policy for fake news. If you spot a piece of fake news, among the various fake handles, you can report the piece to Twitter. Upon reporting the content as ‘offensive’, Twitter would review it and push it down the timeline.
Here’s an illustrated example. (Images for representative purposes)
Spot a tweet you think spreads false, unbelievable information.
In the dropdown menu of the tweet, find the option to ‘Report Tweet’. Click on it.
You’ll get a menu like this, asking you the reason. Choose the best suitable option, and click ‘Next’.
And your complaint would be registered, with further options to either ‘mute’ the profile (where you keep following the profile, but don’t see their tweets) or completely block the tweeter (where you banish the profile to perpetual disappearance from your timeline, apart from unfollowing them)
The social media giants have started taking baby steps towards a cleaner web space, and it’s time netizens get a bit more mature. Stay alert about what you read and verify what you share.
Pledge for a Swachh Digital India, one social post at a time.
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