JAY JOSHI
Recently, Facebook took action on a number of pages that were spreading fake news. This issue is perhaps one of the most discussed and the mot menacing problems of the day, especially in the light of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Other social media networks and messaging services too have taken cognizance of the issue and are rolling out measures to combat it. There is no doubt that this problem is going to be around in the near future, and we as individuals must prepare to detect and negate any information that is fake. How could one do it, and what are social media platforms themselves doing about it? TG life tried to find this out.
“To be honest, your ability to detect fake news is decided by your own political maturity,” says Ajinkya Kulkarni, a social media analyst from Pune. “People who have strong political leanings can generally see through propaganda of their rivals, and even by their own parties in some cases. Fake news are usually targeted at people who are neutral and are disinterested in politics or whose knowledge of the field is superficial. Developing knowledge of key social and political issues is as important today as knowing how to stay safe from hackers and identity theft on social media,” says Kulkarni.
At the moment, various social media platforms are taking steps to curb the rumour-mongering. Vernon Fernandes, partner at Team Inertia Technologies, Panaji, explains, “Platforms such as Facebook rely on big data, and analysing context to detect fake news. They have ‘crawlers’ that can analyse millions of profiles and articles in seconds.
For example, if there are many fake articles circulating about a particular celebrity, the crawlers will scan all information available on the Internet and compare it with the information posted of the official profiles and websites of the concerned person. If the official sources do not show any relation to the other information on the web, than that information is obviously fake.”
Recently, messaging service Whatsapp too launched a new initiative called ‘tipline’ in partnership with an Indian startup to put a check on fake news. The initiative works on two fronts: Users will be able to submit the information they find suspicious to the Checkpoint Tipline. Whatsapp will then compile a database of rumours and then study them. Secondly, the Tipline will verify the information and then get back to the user, telling them whether the content shared by them is true, false, or ‘disputed’. Not just that, the platform will also offer additional information on the topic to enable the user to get the bigger picture.
“Even so, more needs to be done to tackle the problem, and I believe it will be done in the coming years.” says Pranav Dixit, head of a digital marketing and branding firm Yukti in Pune. “We need something akin to the ‘spam filters’ in emails to weed out the fake news. That kind of effective and efficient technology hasn’t been seen yet at least in India,” informed Dixit.
All things said and done, at the end of the day, it is up to the discerning ability of the end user to detect wrong information.
