India's biggest challenge: Time to stifle fake news peddlers

Hameed Ashraf | NT

Bengaluru: When living in a highly technologydriven world where information travels quickly and is unaffected by distance, it is important to learn to use social media platforms responsibly.

One false or inaccurate report might have a negative impact on society, spark riots, or incite hatred.

While digital literacy at several places in India is still low, there are many instances of fake news spreading through social media becoming a serious problem, and in some cases resulting in mob violence and deaths.

With easy access to online platforms, any information can be forwarded without a fact-check.

During 2020, the number of cases filed against people 'circulating fake/ false news/ rumors' under Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) increased by 214 per cent, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

There are certain rules under the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, that deal with cybercrime and spread of misinformation on social media platforms.

But considering the rapidly evolving online media landscape, there is still a need for the rules to be more robustly enforced.

A digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama, Nikhil Pahwa, said that despite all the rules, it is still a challenge for the government to identify the source of content such as obscenity or content related to terrorism or something that causes riots.

"The government has the right to monitor and identify the sources. They have two methods to do this, either they can approach the platform owners or they can hop from person to person to find the originator, which is a tedious task," he said.

He added that the IT Act itself does not allow traceability features to be included into the rules.

Because the social media platforms will have to re-architect their entire platform at the global level which in turn will break the end-to-end encryption system compromising the privacy of billions of users around the world.

There are multiple governments including the Five Eyes (FVEY) Australia, Canada, New Zealand, The United Kingdom and the United States, who are watching the developments of online platforms other than India.

The Five Eyes had earlier written to the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, not to implement the end-to-end encryption for the site.

According to reports, as of 2020, there were 53 crore WhatsApp users in India with 44.8 crore YouTube users, 41 crore Facebook users and 21 crore users of Instagram.

Number of Twitter users, however, stood at 1.75 crore. Tech experts believe that there is a need for stringent laws to maintain cyber security and to keep a tab on online abuse.

According to section 66 (a) of the IT Act, any person who sends a message by any means of communication device any information that is offensive and if specially created to annoy, spread hatred, or criminal intimidation shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to a term of three years and fine.

There is also Section 69 (a) which says that the government has the right to ban or stop public access to any information that is not consistent with provisions of the government, and this section also provides the procedure of blocking access of the public to certain information.

People who don’t comply with this provision will be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

No dearth of fakery

August 2023: Video of a Meitei woman from Churachandpur complaining about the ethnic cleansing of her community in the district was made viral with the claim that she slammed Opposition leaders

August 2023: Old images shared online with the bogus claim that they were recent ones from Nuh district in Haryana, alleging that they were of a VHP yatra being attacked

July 2023: A video from Tamil Nadu does the rounds on social media, misattributed as a clip recorded by three girls from an Udupi college, alongside exaggerations and a communal spin

July 2023: News agency ANI tweets false information about one Abdul Hilim being arrested over the viral Manipur video in which women were paraded naked. NDTV and Outlook pick it up but all tweets were subsequently deleted. In fact, the accused was arrested in another case

June, 2023: Propagandists claim online that the Balasore train accident, which killed 291, was caused by a communallyinspired sabotage, produce a cropped image of a place of worship, which turned out to be an Iskcon temple