5 min
With the recent India-Pakistan tension flaring, social media has turned into a virtual battlefield rife with misinformation. WhatsApp has become an easy platform to transfer unvalidated news since it is easy to share and everyone has an easy access to it.
This misinformation, especially related to sensitive matters can snowball into a huge crisis and now social media platforms are taking concrete steps to put into effect a code of ethics and take stringent measures to fight this problem of fake news.
The Problem Of Fake News
With the advent of easy access to the internet, the masses are easily falling prey to fake news. The consequences might be that it affects a person, organisation or any body personally and deeply. In the recent tension between India and Pakistan, all kinds of misinformation was floating around, including a video of anti-aircraft guns being ferried and seized in Mumbai which was found to be incorrect after checking with Mumbai police.Problem With WhatsApp
WhatsApp comes as an easy platform for misinformation to cater and spread because of the number of users that the country has of the app. Because the app now has are encrypted, it provides a safe place from the government. But because of the encryption, WhatsApp messages cannot be moderated and is hence difficult to fact check the information passed on that is fake. Reasons like political polarisation, ethnic tensions and a growing distrust of politicians all contribute to the current environment in which fake news has flourished. WhatsApp is unfortunately also being used by a number of miscreants to spread fake information for the purpose of spreading hatred and anger and it is possible to remove this from its roots.What Is India Doing To Solve The Problem?
With the advent of misinformation, India is taking a lot of actions to fight this scene and coming up with solutions helping in this realm. Recently, WhatsApp partnered with NASSCOM Foundation to fight this problem of fake news. Together, they are planning to spread among the population of the country about the digital literacy training to tackle the challenge of misinformation by reach around 1000000 people in India and training them to spot false information. The partnership also aims to provide the people with tips and tricks to stay safe from misinformation. The curriculum will be spread across in multiple regional languages. WhatsApp maintains that it neither can nor wants to access any of the messages that are sent on the platform. So content moderation, as Facebook and Twitter are carrying out, isn’t an option. It has started to ban users who show suspicious behaviour or may really be software bots. It has also added a notification to show when a message has been forwarded from another account, and has limited the number of times you can forward a link. WhatsApp has also partnered to solve this issue. One of the ideas that researches have has is a game that makes people aware of how to tackle the fake news problem. The idea is that when people play this game, they will learn more about the various techniques of misinformation and how they are often deployed. It’s based on an idea from social psychology called inoculation theory which holds that preemptively warning and exposing people to a weak dose of misinformation will encourage them to cultivate mental defence against it, leaving them better prepared. This game is in collaboration with the Digital Empowerment Foundation, a media literacy organisation in India that will conduct workshops with the new game. MetaaFact, an Indian startup which has a team of journalists and technologists have come up with their efforts to fight misinformation. They use NLP and ML to track messages and find out whether it is fake or genuine. Check4Spam, a website that is involved with verifying posts on social media, the web traffic. It had found that WhatsApp was the main harbinger of misinformation.- AI Productivity to Add $28 Billion to $84 Billion to India's GDP: Cognizant Study
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