Fake news rules in India, from photoshop to video dubbing. Famous news channels support these news and spreads Govt.'s Propaganda.
FAKE NEWS in India spreads more rapidly, Famous news channel is being bias and declares people Antinational.
WhatsApp has finally found someone to lead its India operations.The world’s largest messaging service platform yesterday (Nov. 21) named Abhijit Bose, co-founder and CEO of the digital-payments company Ezetap, as the head of WhatsApp India. He will take charge in early 2019 and will be based out of Gurugram, Haryana.“Bose and his team will focus on helping businesses, both large and small, connect with their customers,” the Facebook-owned company said in a statement.
He will also oversee WhatsApp’s work to curb the circulation of fake news in India. WhatsApp’s India team will be its first full country team outside the US.Of the messaging service’s 1.5 billion or more monthly active users, over 200 million are in India. So naming an India head was a “necessary step,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “Concerns which emerge from India need to be addressed adequately, and there needs to be senior executives who can take these decisions,” Gupta told Quartz.
India is the largest democracy in the world, people have been enjoying the democratic nature of this country since the formation of the constitution. Now if I tell you that the democratic establishment of this country is at risk, you might be surprised but this is the harsh reality, and the reason behind this is the propaganda of fake news.
The wave of fake news came into light during the Presidential Elections of the United States in 2016. It all started in Macedonia, with some youngsters creating pro-Trump websites to gain traffic and earn money through advertisements .i.e. clickbait. This business model eventually became successful, and believe it or not it had an impact on the election results too.
The Guardian did a story on this issue, highlighting the business and the money involved in the fake news propaganda online.But in India, the propaganda of fake news is not just a mere business model but also a political propaganda. The business of fake news involve politicians, journalists, political activists and even the mainstream media outlets, risking the trust of people; the ultimate goal of fake news is perception management.
Photoshopped images, WhatsApp forwards and doctored videos are being posted online to manipulate the masses.In May 2017, just a day before the third anniversary of the inauguration of the current central government, Bhartiya Janta Party, a mob in the eastern state of Jharkhand went on a killing spree, triggered by a simple WhatsApp message. Three innocent men were beaten to death by an uncontrolled mob that falsely assumed that those men were human traffickers, based on the warning they received in the message.
A total of seven men were killed mercilessly, in a fury that was born on social media and based on baseless information that people received on whatsapp in Jharkhand. Similar incidents have been reported from the West Bengal region too.When I go through social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter etc, I find fake news quite often but the first noticeable event I came across was when a celebrated political leader posted fake news on social network was when— Lalu Prasad Yadav tweeted a doctored image of his own rally in order to increase his impact on social media.
And after this, there were dozens of reports of different verified accounts posting fake news online.
Chhattisgarh’s PWD Minister Rajesh Munat, to promote his state’s impeccable infrastructure, shared a picture on Twitter of a Vietnamese bridge as a bridge in Raigarh.
The sad part is the involvement of mainstream media houses. In March last year, it was reported by some media houses that the UP government had launched a WhatsApp number to address public grievances. This number was actually started by Ghaziabad Railway Police to provide help during train journeys.
What makes the present era of fake news unique is the unpredictability and ungovernableness of information flowing freely across the internet. There are numerous ways in which fake news circulates in the country, from Twitter trolls and WhatsApp forwards to stand-alone propaganda websites. The content takes various shades. From your phone exploding on you answering an unknown call, to nano GPS chips embedded in the new Rs 2000 note, the scope of fake news segues from the innocuously harmless to the viciously dangerous to plain banal.
Understandably, proliferation of fake news on WhatsApp networks is the highest, the messenger’s end-to-end encryption makes it impossible to trace offenders, giving somewhat of a technical immunity to those spreading unreliable content. India currently generates 200 million monthly users for WhatsApp that runs on most of India’s 300 million smartphones.Though the nature of fake news in not just political, the nature of right-wing inspired fake news websites unabashedly spreading misinformation on the internet, is.
Sample this: Ministers and spokespersons in the Modi government have time and again used fake images to trumpet the cause of grand India under Narendra Modi.
In perhaps the biggest irony-laden gaffe, Nupur Sharma, BJP Spokesperson, used an image from the Gujarat riots to raise a call for protest against the Basirhat killing. Another BJP member from Haryana had earlier used a fake image from a Bhojpuri film in the urgency to call people to protest against Mamta Banerjee’s government. On July 8, a little over 250 individuals had gathered at Jantar Mantar, Delhi to protest this call.
In June 2017, the Home Ministry embarrassed the government with a photo captioned in its annual report as “floodlighting along the border” that turned out to be from the Spain-Morocco border.
Founder and chairman of Essel Group, Dr Subhash Chandra recently tendered a clarification regarding the allegations levelled against Zee Media for airing doctored videos. Dr Chandra's over ten-minute-long monologue was introduced by his star anchor Sudhir Chaudhary who mentioned the inability of certain people to digest what he termed as Zee News' "positive" and "nationalist" coverage of news.
An impromptu act?
Chaudhary claimed that Dr Chandra was speaking at an event in Haryana when a journalist questioned him regarding the JNU controversy. Thereafter, Dr Chandra decided to straightaway head to Zee Media's studio to directly address the subject via his channel.
In his brief before Chandra's address was aired, DNA presenter Chaudhary mentioned that Dr Chandra's speech wasn't written and he was speaking his heart out which effectively meant that Dr Chandra was speaking impromptu.
While the background story, which may well have spurred Dr Chandra's reaction can be true, the attempt to portray the speech as an entirely impromptu exercise certainly isn't. It cannot be so because at several crucial intervals of the speech, Dr Chandra literally changes camera angles. He goes from looking at one camera to one another, while taking a dig at secularists and praising Narendra Modi.
In order to uphold the channel's impartiality, Dr Chandra mentioned that during his 45 years of professional experience he has made more friends in the Congress and other parties as opposed to the BJP. He claimed that Congress leaders privately admitted to him that only Narendra Modi is capable of ensuring development in India by fighting poverty and hunger.
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