COMBATTING POST TRUTH, FAKE NEWS, FALSE NEWS AND CENSORSHIP
Bhopal:MMNN: 3 April 2018

[Taking recourse to numerous global studies, Prof. Ujjwal K Chowdhury throws light into the oft-repeated concepts of post-truth, fake news, false news and resultant press censorship in the era of hashtag journalism and suggests ways to combat the menace.] As the world debates on fake news and its multiple dimensions, authoritarian regimes across the world are making it an excuse to censor free speech and ensure conformity. While serious news organizations are mulling possible measures to contain the journalistic menace, there is a worrisome global trend that is surfacing – labelling anti-establishment news as fake news and crushing the very essence of democracy. The governments across countries in Southeast South Asia in general and the Indian government, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in particular have been consistently striking at the very concept of press freedom in the name of curbing fake news. Tackling Fake News: The South East Asian Way In a recent turn of events on April 3, the Indian PM Narendra Modi overruled an executive order issued a day earlier that sought to penalize journalists for publishing fake news. The said order sought to amend the Guidelines for Accreditation of Journalists. According to the now-defunct guidelines, the accreditation of a journalist would have stood cancelled if he/ she would have been found to create and propagate fake news by regulating agencies. The journalists were up in arms against the order and called it a direct attack on the freedom of expression thereby forcing the government to step back. However, there is a distinct possibility of the government re-introducing the measure in some form or the other. It is pertinent to note that the Indian Information & Broadcasting Minister, Smriti Irani, recently speaking at the Rising India Conclave of Network 18, had categorically noted that the Indian government is debating on the contours of a law to prevent fake news online. The most worrying factor for media rights advocates is that several countries are promoting new legislations or expanding existing regulations to make publishing fake news an offence. The fear is that, rather than focusing on false stories published on social media, authoritarian leaders will use the new laws to target legitimate news outlets that are critical of them. 2 The term fake news has entered the lexicon of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose leaders commended the work done by their governments in countering its spread. Recently, the Philippines’ corporate regulator revoked the operating licence of Rappler, a news site whose scrutiny of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs has been a thorn in his side. John Nery, the associate editor and a columnist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has also come under attack from the government, said ‘fake news’ is now glibly used by people who don’t like what they hear. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen regularly accuses critical media outlets of spreading ‘fake news’. Huy Vannak, the undersecretary of state at the Cambodia’s Interior Ministry, told Reuters, “Everyone, including ordinary citizens, has to fight against fake news because fake news is like poison or a gun and it can kill our beautiful society.” In Malaysia, Prime Minister Najib Razak has accused opponents of using the media to spread fake news on a scandal over state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). 1MDB is being investigated in at least six countries for money-laundering. The government of Singapore, where curbs on free speech have often been criticised by human rights advocates, is planning legislation to tackle fake online information. Thailand already has a cyber-security law under which the spread of false information carries a jail sentence of up to seven years. Myanmar has assailed foreign news organisations for spreading ‘fake news’ about a military crackdown in its Rakhine state that triggered the exodus of more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh. It has detained at least 29 journalists since Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2016. Philip Bowring, a former editor of the news magazine Far Eastern Economic Review, which closed in 2009, said ‘fake news’ is ‘a convenient phrase’ for governments that would in any case find ways to crimp press freedom. In the given context, it is important to understand certain associated terms so that things can be put in perspective. 3 Post-truth as a Concept Post-truth represents a situation when facts take the backseat and emotional appeals and personal beliefs start shaping public opinion. Let us take a couple of contextual examples to understand the term. “In this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire” and “Some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-truth age” are two sentences that delineate the meaning of post-truth. In the given context, it is important to define post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) as a political culture in which debate is framed largely by emotional appeals, and by the repeated assertion of talking points ignoring factual rebuttals. Post-truth differs from the traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by relegating truth to be a concern of secondary importance. A defining trait of post-truth politics is that campaigners continue to repeat their talking points, even if the same are found to be untrue. Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in American, Australian, Bavarian, British, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish politics, as with other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media. In 2016, ‘post-truth’ was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year subject to the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. In 2015, media and politics scholar Jayson Harsin coined the term ‘Regime of Post-Truth’ covering many aspects of post-truth politics. He argues that a convergent set of developments have created the conditions of post-truth society: the political communication informed by cognitive science, which aims at managing perceptions and beliefs of segmented populations through techniques like micro-targeting which includes rumours and falsehoods; the fragmentation of modern and more centralized media; the attention economy marked by information overload, user-generated content and fewer trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate; the algorithms which govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, based on what users want and not on what is factual; and news media which have been marred by plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda and changing news values. Post-truth and Social Media 4 Social media adds a dimension, as user networks can become echo chambers where one political viewpoint dominates and scrutiny of claims fails, allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop, which can repeat post-truth claims. In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them. The digital culture allows anybody with a computer and access to the internet to post their opinions online which may become legitimized through echo-chambers. Content may be judged based on how many views a post gets, creating an atmosphere based on click bait that appeals to emotion. Content which gets more views is continually filtered around different internet circles, regardless of its legitimacy. The internet allows people to choose where they get their information, allowing them to reinforce their own opinions. Trumpian and Modi-fied Post-truth Era Consider how far Donald Trump is estranged from fact. He inhabits a fantastical realm where Barack Obama’s birth certificate was faked and he founded the Islamic State, the Clintons are killers and the father of a rival was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F. Kennedy. Trump is the leading exponent of “post-truth” politics – a reliance on assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact. And he is not alone! Members of Poland’s government assert that a previous president, who died in a plane crash, was assassinated by Russia. Turkish politicians claim that the perpetrators of the recent bungled coup were under the CIA. In the Modi-Shah- Adityanath era of post-truth politics in India, cow smugglers are lynched, every Hindu-Muslim marriage is love jihad, becoming a Hindu is Ghar Wapsi, anyone questioning the efficacy of an army act is considered an anti-national, slogans of freedom from poverty are considered to be secession calls and the likes. Feelings and not facts matter in this sort of campaigning where the us-versus- them mindset dominates. Why Post-truth? Post-truth politics has many parents. Some are noble. The questioning of institutions and received wisdom is a democratic virtue. A sceptical analysis of leaders is the first step to 5 reform. Communism perished because people were prepared to challenge the official propaganda. But corrosive forces are also at play, one being anger. Many voters feel let down and left behind. They are scornful of assertions that the euro would improve their lives or Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Popular trust in expert opinion and established institutions has tumbled across the Western democracies. Post-truth has also been abetted by the evolution of the media. The fragmentation of news sources has created an atomised world in which lies, rumour and gossip rule. Presented with evidence that contradicts a popular belief, people have a tendency to ditch the facts first. Well-intentioned journalistic practices bear blame too. The pursuit of ‘fairness’ in reporting often creates phoney balance at the expense of truth. It is tempting to think that supporters might realize their mistake when policies, sold on dodgy prospectuses, start to fail. The worst part of post-truth politics, though, is that this self- correction cannot be trusted. When lies make the political system dysfunctional, its poor results can feed the alienation that harbour post-truth in the first place. Pro-truth Lobby Needs to Stand and be Counted To counter this, mainstream politicians need to find a language of rebuttal. Humility and the acknowledgment of past hubris would help. The truth has powerful forces on its side. Any politician who makes contradictory promises to different audiences will soon be exposed on Facebook or YouTube. Democracies have institutions to help, too. An independent legal system has mechanisms to establish truth. Fake and False News There is a conceptual error here. When we cite fake news, it is presumed that there is an original piece of news which is being faked. However, it is largely about false news, news that does not exist or perhaps exist in a totally different form. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral in their seminal study on false and true news, investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 6 million people more than 4.5 million times. They classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98 percent agreement on the classifications. All rumour cascades were investigated through six independent fact-checking organizations (snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com) by parsing the title, body, and verdict (true, false, or mixed) of each rumour investigation reported on their websites and automatically collecting the cascades corresponding to those rumours on Twitter. Falsehood was found to diffuse significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information. They found that false news was more novel. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it. Both true and false information spread rapidly through online media. Defining what is true and false has become a common political strategy, replacing debates based on a mutually agreed on set of facts. The economies are not immune to the spread of falsity either. False rumours have affected stock prices. Indeed, our responses to everything from natural disasters to terrorist attacks have been disrupted by the spread of false news online. New social technologies, which facilitate rapid information sharing, can enable the spread of misinformation. Technology has helped spreading single rumours like the discovery of the Higgs boson or the 2010-Haitian Earthquake and multiple rumours from a single disaster event like the 2013-Boston Marathon Bombing. In our current political climate, a fluid terminology has arisen around ‘fake news’, foreign interventions in politics through social media and our understanding of what constitutes news, fake news, false news, rumours, rumour cascades and other related terms. Although at one time, it may have been appropriate to think of fake news as referring to the veracity of a news story, we now believe that this phrase has been irredeemably polarized. As politicians have developed a political strategy of labelling news sources that do not support their positions as unreliable and sources that support their positions as reliable, the term has lost all connection to the actual veracity of the information presented. 7 Their study shows that falsehood also reached far more people than the truth. Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top one percent of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people. The spread of falsehood was aided by its virality, meaning that falsehood did not simply spread through broadcast dynamics but rather through peer-to peer diffusion. It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people. Novelty attracts human attention, contributes to productive decision-making and encourages information sharing. Although we cannot claim that novelty causes retweets or that novelty is the only reason why false news is retweeted more often, we do find that false news is more novel and that novel information is more likely to be retweeted. False news can drive the misallocation of resources during terror attacks and natural disasters, the misalignment of business investments and misinformed elections. Unfortunately, although the amount of false news online is clearly increasing, the scientific understanding of how and why false news spreads is currently based on ad hoc rather than large-scale systematic analyses. Trolling: What and When Successful? Trolling is the art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off, usually via the internet. Trolling does not mean just making rude remarks – shouting swear words at someone doesn’t count as trolling and is considered flaming. Spamming isn’t trolling either. The most essential part of trolling is convincing your victim that either a) you truly believe in what you are saying no matter how outrageous or b) give your victim malicious instructions under the guise of help. Signs that your trolling is successful – your victim screaming in all- caps at you or making personal attacks or making a crude remark, before quickly logging off. Signs that your trolling is unsuccessful – your victim identifying you as a troll or your efforts being ignored or being counter-trolled. Counter-trolling (or reverse trolling) is an effective method of redeeming yourself after being trolled. It involves taking the topic at hand you were being trolled with, and use it against the said troll. Grim Conclusions of the Largest Study of Fake News “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But perhaps no more! The massive new study published recently in Science analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of 8 Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years. The study finds that fake news and rumours reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news. The new study suggests that it will not be easy. While false stories outperform the truth on every subject — business, terrorism and war, science and technology and entertainment — fake news about politics regularly does best. The blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “Because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.” Why does falsehood do so well? An MIT team settled on two hypotheses. First, fake news seems to be more ‘novel’ than real news. Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. Yet, these do not encompass the most depressing finding of the study. The MIT team found that the users who share accurate information have more followers, and send more tweets, than fake-news sharers. These fact-guided users have also been on Twitter for longer, and they are more likely to be verified. In short, the most trustworthy users can boast every obvious structural advantage that Twitter, either as a company or a community, can bestow on its best users. In short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend. In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found. 9 Tackling False News and Post-truth Journalism Both technology companies and governments have started to make efforts to tackle the challenge of ‘post-truth politics’. In an article for the journal Global Policy, Prof. Nayef Al- Rodhan suggested four particular responses: 1. Improve the technological tools for fact checking. 2. Greater involvement and visibility for scientists and the scientific community. 3. Stronger government action. The most important challenge here is to ensure that such state-led efforts are not used as a tool for censorship. 4. Securitizing fake news. Psychological solutions include the so-called fake news ‘vaccine’. Combating False News in India India, one of the biggest internet markets in the world, has its share of troubles with fake news, but Indian society has also given birth to important initiatives to tackle the issue. For instance, a news portal called The Quint has started a section called Webquf that debunks fake news. Some of the leading grassroots citizens driven anti false-news initiatives as of today are: (1) Boom FactCheck (BFC), established by Govindraj Ethiraj; (2) Social Media Hoax Slayer (SMHS), started and run by Pankaj Jain; (3) Pratik Sinha’s Alt News and (4) check4spam.com initiated by Shammas Oliyath and Bal Krishn Birla. As news of two Indian soldiers allegedly beheaded by Pakistan broke, several thousand WhatsApp groups came alive. A video purportedly showing the beheading, one by a chainsaw and another knifed in the throat while singing Vande Mataram, went viral. A week later, it turned out that the video was shot in 2011 and the men were Spanish drug dealers. It was exposed by Mumbai-based businessman Pankaj Jain who runs the SM Hoax Slayer. Pratik Sinha, a 35-year- old Ahmedabad-based software techie, co-founded a website and Twitter handle — altnews.in and @altnews_in — to counter “deliberate underground political propaganda”. “It is extremely dangerous and no political party is working to stop it,” he says. Bangalore-based Check4spam.com, an organisation that works on exposing hoaxes, says it is having trouble keeping up with flow of requests to verify false news. The site gets 250,000 visitors in a month on an average. 10 On the other hand, Ram Puri, a software engineer, believes that WhatsApp traffic is vital for generating public opinion. He is a member of 10 WhatsApp groups and receives almost 500 messages an hour. “I get to know if there is an incident in the country before it hits the headlines on a TV channel,” he says. A self-confessed ‘nationalist’, he says he keenly watches and forwards videos on the Army’s offensive in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country. In 2015, for instance, the police said WhatsApp messages had led to a man being lynched in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and four beatings in nearby Gandhinagar. Mohammad Akhlaq was murdered by a mob in his village house in Uttar Pradesh the same year after villagers said they had seen pictures on WhatsApp proving he had slaughtered a cow. Forensic reports later proved that the meat was not that of a cow. Experts say fake or false news falls in two categories — so-called news articles and videos published by various websites, Twitter handles, Facebook pages and YouTube channels; and the other, WhatsApp forwards that go viral. “These news articles or videos are run by either individuals or entities that have a certain ideological bias. Most of these websites that we have come across are run by non-journalists whose goal is to twist public opinion,” says Jency Jacob, the managing editor of Boom, an initiative to counter false news. Boom’s sister organisation, factchecker.in, also counters ‘news’ or public statements that may be fake. But how do these hoax-slayers dig out the lies? While software tools are used to trace videos on YouTube, key words are reverse googled to find the original context. Sinha explains, “Sometimes, I break a video into frames and then search for the original. It can take an hour or a whole day,” says techie Sinha. Data scientist Rishabh Srivastava says fake news in India is of deeper concern since it is primarily spread through WhatsApp. Data analytics can show us the ethnicity and gender profile of those forwarding a certain piece of news that help us determine whether it is false or not but the nature of WhatsApp encryption makes it difficult to counter it, he adds. So, would a fake news legislation help clamp down on these elements? Lawyer Apar Gupta says that India has the most prescriptive speech laws for a democratic country and a law on fake news might end up encouraging censorship. “We also need to strengthen existing institutions like the Press Council of India,” he adds. One of the most common techniques of the fake news industry is to take images out of context. Fake news with stolen and doctored images is found worldwide and could even lead to real social strife. In India, some of the most out-of- the-blue cases of images taken out of 11 their original context include a story claiming that an old Hindu temple carried images of modern technology – such as an astronaut — or that researchers unearthed the 80-foot- long skeleton of Ghatotkacha, a giant described in the Mahabharata epic. The fake news slayers have to be particularly good at using reverse image search engines, such as TinEye. A reverse image search enables the searcher to find when the image had been used before – if it had – and, obviously, finding earlier sources makes it possible to compare the images and find the adulterations. Pratik Sinha of Alt News reveals that he does the same with videos by breaking them into frames and then putting these stills in the reverse image search. As revealed on SMHS, the image of the astronaut on the ‘temple’ turned out to originate from the New Cathedral in Salamanca. The astronaut and other modern touches were added to that church during the 1992 restoration. The skeleton of a ‘giant’ was in reality a sculpture by an Italian artist. Reverse image searching also helps to counter the doctors of doctored images. Photographs are not just being stolen – they are also being morphed or altered. A clever combination of two historical photographs created the image of the members of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, saluting before the British queen. The hoax slayers also refer to verified accounts on social media such as Twitter or Facebook. This method may have its limitations: many times, well-known people such as politicians or journalists share fake news and doctored images accidentally. Yet, looking at the social media user profiles, while not necessarily helpful in judging the credibility of the news, helps in uncovering the agenda behind the news. Going beyond the web by contacting official institutions to verify a story also helped in a number of cases. For example, Ethiraj and Jacob of Boom FactCheck recommend contacting local police when the news clearly relates to a smaller locality. Boom FactCheck did exactly that in assessing the validity of a story about a violent abduction in the state of Rajasthan. The importance of verifying a story with the authorities was recently confirmed when a school bus was attacked by goons in the city of Gurugram. While it was widely believed that the attackers came from a fringe, right wing Hindu group called the Shri Rajput Karni Sena, many netizens shared the news that the men that pelting stones at the school bus were Muslims. The Gurugram police, however, denied that any followers of Islam were arrested in connection to the event. 12 Debunking Fake News Visual cues, such as photos and graphics, portraying Modi as the saviour of the nation, alongside memes mocking the other parties’ candidates were shared on social media by a team of dedicated Modi supporters. In another instance, a photo meant to show a younger, humble Modi sweeping the floors went viral, and was later debunked as a doctored image of another man. As dystopian as it may seem, the fake news problem in India is very real. In all, seven people lost their lives in two separate incidents in Jharkhand, in a fury that was based on falsified social media information. A couple of months after the Jharkhand incident, amidst a communal flare-up in the state of West Bengal, a BJP leader, Vijeta Malik, shared a screenshot from a local feature film showing a woman being molested by Muslims. While websites like AltNews rake up to a million views a month, the lack of human resources to counter people like Vijeta adds another layer of challenge. They have to prioritise investigations based on the urgency afforded to the matter. “If a politician is at the forefront of spreading fake news, we give that priority,” he explains. However, if a video is involved, that takes precedence over all else. “Videos are a high priority, because they are always so dangerous,” he illustrates with the example of a series of fake videos that went viral after India lost a cricket match against Pakistan in June. “Multiple videos were circulated on WhatsApp allegedly showing Indian Muslims celebrating the victory of Pakistan. All except one of those videos was genuine; it was from Indian-administered Kashmir,” he recalls. How Is Fake News Circulated? Surprisingly, fake news production and circulation seem rather meticulous and well- organised. Websites such as Postcard News, an Indian version of Breitbart, have cropped up and made a successful business model out of fake news. The website gets further momentum when shared by prominent BJP leaders and right-wing influencers. Additionally, a blitzkrieg strategy is adopted on social media, wherein BJP followers post tweets and messages taken from a common template created in advance, with the idea of pushing a suitable ‘trend’ to 13 popularity. Recently the founder-editor of Postcard News was arrested in Karnataka on ground of spreading enmity between communities. One such template acquired by Al Jazeera, created on a Google document, shows the centralised nature of a social media campaign. Pankaj Jain feels the fake news machinery is not designed to serve the interests of just one political entity or ideology. “Politics is dirty, and now everyone is employing fake news as a strategy for power play,” he said citing false claims by the opposition about a railway project signed by the ruling party. Elaborating on the role of mobile-based messenger applications, he remains cautiously fearful of the role of WhatsApp. “While WhatsApp isn’t the only platform, in India, it does play an important role in circulation of fake news,” he explains. “It allows you to forward a message and then completely delete it from your own system, thereby shedding responsibility. Also, often those messages ‘forwarded as received’ are also easily edited to suit one’s agenda,” he adds. The Business of Fake News “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The quote that is often, and ironically, wrongly attributed to Joseph Goebbels – the propaganda minister during Nazi Germany – perhaps best sums up what’s happening in India. More interestingly, those participating in this blitzkrieg action are not just BJP’s online foot soldiers, but also members of the parliament as well as several ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Indian ministers have often been called out for sharing images and information on social media that is in fact untrue. Jain puts the responsibility of this epidemic on the information consumers. “The only driving force in fake news in the existing, strongly-held bias among people,” he insists. What this means is that, a lot of the time, social and mainstream media feed off one another to get more eyeballs. However, the larger issue is still one of media literacy and the fight against fake news still needs to be led by mainstream legacy media. People segment organisations into those they trust and those that they believe are there to entertain them. There is a higher onus on those that they trust to do more. This could be as simple as breaking down an article and educating readers how they work. It can be as basic as distinguishing an 14 opinion piece from a news piece and breaking down articles and identifying things like sources, facts and analyses. Finally, it is the protracted efforts of the Civil Society, assisted by a movement for Media Literacy through academia and alternative media that can to an extent combat the menace of false, fake, post-truth news and trolling. BOX-ITEM: Some Top False Stories in Contemporary India 1. UNESCO Declares PM Modi Best Prime Minister: UNESCO has been one of the primary alleged sources of fake news in India. In June 2016, the given news broke out. 2. UNESCO Declares ‘Jana Gana Mana’ Best National Anthem: This is another favourite Indian rumour involving the UNESCO. It broke out during the 2016- Independence Day. 3. UNESCO Declares New Rs. 2,000 Note Best Currency in the World: This is another fake UNESCO certificate for India after demonetization. 4. New Notes Have a GPS Chip to Detect Black Money: This is a ridiculous demonetization rumour that proliferated after PM Modi announced demonetization. 5. New Notes Have Radioactive Ink: This is another result of demonetization. 6. WhatsApp Profile Pictures Can be Used by ISIS for Terror Activities: A WhatsApp forward; supposedly sent by the Delhi police commissioner, requested ‘mothers’ and ‘sisters’ to delete their WhatsApp profile pictures for security purposes. 7. RBI Declares the Rs. 10 Coin Invalid: Months before demonetization was announced, the message that the RBI had declared the Rs 10 coin invalid spread through WhatsApp. 8. Salt Shortage in India: WhatsApp messages of a salt shortage in November 2016 triggered panic buying at markets past midnight. BOX-ITEM: Some Tools Bust Myths  Google reverse image search is favoured by all of the Indian myth-busters. It allows you to upload an image online and then search for where it may have appeared.  TinEye also allows readers to check if images have been manipulated.  The free video to jpg converter transforms video into images that can then be searched separately. 15  InVid has developed a browser application that allows people to add video links into it. It then provides detailed analysis about the video in question.
The author is currently the School Head, School of Media, Pearl Academy, which is a part of Laureate International Group. He has been earlier the Dean of Symbiosis and Amity Universities, and of Whistling Woods International.