Fighting fake

As CRPF mourns its dead in Pulwama, it also fights fake news that says it was all done to spread hatred. A screenshot showing a post claiming 13 sniffer dogs died in the Pulwama is fake.

Yes you got it right. It has now has taken the form of fake news and now it is worse than ever.

A video went viral on Facebook and WhatsApp wherein an explosion of a convoy from a CCTV footage claiming to be a clip of the Pulwama explosion. It was classified as fake. A few days later, another troll did the rounds stating 13 sniper dogs also died with the 49 soldiers on social media platforms. This is most certainly not the first time that fake news pertaining to the armed forces  is being circulated.  

A recent study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has found that people below the age of 20 or those above the age of 50 are most susceptible to be swayed by fake news.

Fake shots and videos that went viral:

 

 

 

The incidents of fake news in India have sky rocketed in the last three to four years so to say. There have been various incidents of mob lynching simply due to the circulation of fake WhatsApp messages.

Social media platforms have been inundated with a barrage of misinformation as emotions ran high following the devastating attack on a Central Police Reserve Force (CRPF) convoy that claimed the lives of 40 jawans at Pulwama in Jammu & Kashmir on February 14.

BOOM tracked down multiple misleading and dangerous social media posts, falsely claiming to provide information on the Pulwama attack. Here’s a partial list.

An old unverified video of massive explosion has been widely shared as a footage of the Pulwama attack. The 28-second long video, possibly a CCTV capture of the street, which was shaken by a large intensity explosion, documents a convoy of three vehicles passing through a deserted road.

In it’s detailed report BOOM has said: At the 11 second mark, a huge explosion occurs, impacting the camera, which was mounted at a distance, capturing it. The video is being circulated as that from the deadly attack in Pulwama.

BOOM ran a reverse image search of several frames from the video and found out that it is originally of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), packed in one of the trucks passing the convoy near Camp Taji in Iraq. The video was uploaded by multiple YouTube users as early as April 2008. The dateline of the CCTV video, at the time of filming the explosion is that of 9/2/ 2007.

This is not the first time Indians have been victimised of such videos. While Facebook along with government agencies worldover is trying to clamp down heavily on fake news, the agenda continues.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly said, “We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things. Within this, those principles have real trade-offs and real tug on each other. In this case, we feel like our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed.”

Talking on the subject, cyber security expert Pavan Duggal argues that the main problem is India does not have an anti-fake news regulation or law. “We don’t even have a definition of what constitutes as fake news”, he adds on the current scenario of the fake news fiasco. He referred to the Oxford University study in July 2018 on study on computational propaganda predicting that the instances of fake news are to skyrocket in the years to come.

He further adds the IT Act (2000) is inadequate to deal with the ongoing fiasco of fake news. When asked about whether there is an organization to look into the reporting and tackling the issue of fake news, he says, “In India, there is no one agency to report.”

He adds, “When I look at the NCRB, they have not found any data and figures related to fake news.”

He is hopeful the situation can be curbed soon though. “We would need to inculcate cyber education in our school curriculum from the first standard itself,” he says, adding, “There is a need to come up with campaigns in cooperation with the stakeholders in schools and colleges involving parents.Unless there’s a social awareness, such agenda cannot be stopped. ”