New
Delhi:
The great Indian election season has hit midway — with three phases of
voting now over and four more to go — but social media platforms are still
scrambling to control the spread of election-related misinformation.
The great Indian election season has hit midway — with three phases of
voting now over and four more to go — but social media platforms are still
scrambling to control the spread of election-related misinformation.
Social
media “warriors” are busy propagating “reworked” and “reoriented” content related
to political news, government scams, historical myths, patriotism and
nationalism on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.
“Apart
from the fake news and doctored contents, chatbots are sending bulk WhatsApp
messages on active mobile numbers, not only on WhatsApp but on Facebook
Messenger as well,” one of the nation’s leading social media experts, Anoop
Mishra, told journalists.
There
are several cases where people who joined Facebook renamed their Pages, Groups
and accounts later, only to use it for spreading their political agenda in the
election season.
Despite
Facebook’s efforts, such misinformation is thriving and has reached mammoth
levels, say experts.
“Over
90,000 groups on WhatsApp and more than 200 fake Facebook Pages and accounts
are currently influencing the group members and followers with biased political
content,” Mishra said.
The
content ranges from linking fake statistics and the government’s policies to
news prompting regional violence, to manipulating political news, corruption
scandals, historical myths, propaganda to patriotism and Hindu nationalism.
Meanwhile
the main political parties are leaving no stone unturned in reaching out to
voters via various social media platforms.
Social
media platforms, however, say they are proactively disabling bots and fake
accounts being used for political interference in India.
Facebook
said recently it is removing or blocking about one million abusive accounts a
day with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
tools.
The
social media giant has also removed nearly 700 Pages, Groups and accounts in
India for violating its policies on what it calls “coordinated inauthentic
behaviour” and spam.
It now
has Ad Library, a searchable database, in place in India. Indians spent around
Rs70 million (Dh3.68 million) for running political ads on Facebook and
Instagram in the first 20 days of April, while the amount spent on these
platforms in February-March was about Rs100 million.
On the
other hand, Twitter has announced a new tool within the platform to make it
easier for users to report attempts to interfere in the general elections in
India through spread of misleading information about voting.
A new way to do things
It
earlier launched an Ads Transparency Centre that allows anyone to view details
on political campaigning ads and billing information in India.
WhatsApp
has also launched a research project in India where over 200 million users in
the country can tip off fake news, misinformation and rumours related to
elections.
Launched
by PROTO, a media skilling start-up, the tip line will help create a database
of rumours to study misinformation during elections for Checkpoint — a research
project commissioned by WhatsApp.
Are
these measures sufficient to curb the fake news in the world’s biggest
election?
“The
social media giants began their work towards safeguarding the India elections a
bit late and some of the measures were announced near to the poll dates. It is
difficult to tell if these measures will bear fruits and tame the fake news
factories or not,” Mishra said
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