have you come across these headlines recently UNESCO declares moody as the best Prime Minister Pakistan approves Mandarin as an official language Jack Sparrow's character was inspired by Lord Krishna and a gold-plated car was bought for industrialist emani's daughter-in-law so what's common to all these headlines there are a hundred percent fake or false but it doesn't end there it gets worse in the last two years we've been grappling in India with a terrible phenomenon called whatsapp killings over 33 people have died because they have been killed by rampaging mobs on the suspicion of being child kidnappers
over rumors spread on social media platforms like Facebook whatsapp share chat and others which add up to something like 500 million subscribers in Karnataka earlier this year a young engineer working for Accenture was driving through a village along with his friends he was pulled out beaten up and killed on the suspicion of being a child kidnapper in Assam two youngsters driving in an SUV were similarly pulled out after being stopped and killed by a village by a mob in a village on the suspicion that they were child kidnappers India must be the only country where
social media has led to rumors which have led to such brutal murders and killings have a close look at this video this is the video that has perhaps led to more deaths than any other video in recent times every day brings to us hundreds or even thousands of real sounding messages wonder cures for cancer fake news about banks communally sensitive fake news aimed at creating divisions in society and violence and combination pain medicine that kills and yes there's plastic rice and potato chips that catch fire last year the entire internet not just the social media
platforms but a wash with rumors about state-owned banks shutting down none of them have as yet but try telling that to a 60 or 70 year old pensioner whose life savings are locked up in a fixed deposit in one of those banks earlier this year in the monsoons the state of Kerala in southwest India was hit by floods but more than the floods more than the hundreds of people who died more than the billions of dollars of destruction that happened what made news was fake news every are they would be videos posts whatsapp forwards of
dams bursting animals being swept away and donations being promised when they clearly were not for the hundreds and thousands of people who were living away the near and dear ones trying to find out what was happening in Kerala you can understand the anxiety that these these people were going through so how did we get into this well we had boom we're a bunch of fact-checkers based in Mumbai I started noticing the early trends in 2016 towards the end just ahead of the u.s. presidential elections it turned out later that they were enterprising youngsters sitting in
Macedonia writing and creating blatantly false content and putting it on the internet with the objective of generating traffic and ad revenue these messages and posts and websites were not debunked by mainstream media as they perhaps could have so these posts about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were shared and believed what made it worse was that people using technology from the now-defunct Cambridge analytic are used used targeting in a way that they could reach the people who they knew were willing recipients and we're talking about tens of millions of people so the question could be why
does false news get believed so easily well the answer or at least one of the answers is speed velocity creates veracity we believe because we receive these messages from the people we hold nearest and dearest to us our friends and family a study by the MIT earlier this year of 126 thousand posts tweeted three million times showed that false news travels faster deeper and further than true news and it's more novel so what incentivizes people why would someone create all this could be the next question well it turns out that for some people there is
a business model political parties do it because they use it to sow seeds of distrust and Prejudice ahead of elections as we are seeing today in the world of Business and Finance stock prices could be moved up and down as a company or an e-commerce company called in fee beam found out when their stock price was how much seventy one percent thanks to rumors on whatsapp that questioned their financials so how do we at boom-bust fake news might be a next question well we have three stages first research we use a lot of data and
we do number crunching the second we use technology and tools very simple ones like Google reverse image search which I'm going to talk about more and finally there's good old-fashioned journalism we call up people we talk to them you get statements on the record so let me show you two examples let's go back to Kerala at the time of the floods the story and a video about people lining up to buy alcohol they were indeed lining up so we zoomed in on these images when closer found out the names of the establishments that you could
see there did various Google searches and call them and got statements on record asking them or saying what this line was about well yes there was a line but it was to buy something more even scare sir that's petrol a fire and a refinery in Mumbai we froze frame the images did a Google reverse image on the still frames and found that yes there was a fire in a refinery but that was in Mexico so what is the way forward is this going to change or can it get worse well we don't know because the
people who spread fake news have a definitive definite motive and a profitable motive to do it as I said earlier when we've also found in our experience that push back works in the last year we've called out a whole bunch of politicians social media influences and even mainstream media organizations for peddling or distributing evidently fake news Shashi Tharoor many of you are fans parades travel hidden Bay the bubble soup Rio and then some of the news organizations we find that as we've pushed back many of these organizations or individuals are far more careful today about
what they tweet or retweet or endorse and to that extent it works we also work with organizations like Facebook what we do is to put a strike on stories that have been flagged as false news by users of Facebook and when we put a strike which means that we've established it as fake Facebook throttles its distribution ensuring that more people don't treat it so the battle continues earlier this year we launched a whatsapp helpline do take it down and we've been flooded with posts and forwards and you can guess what so much so that we
are not even able to respond to all of it the good news in some ways is that we are not alone local police in many parts of India are also using the same social media that they are battling with to spread awareness and education but the battle is a little bigger and it's actually within us because the law will not prevent information or misinformation from reaching you or the mobile phones that you carry so the good news that I take away at some times is that younger people are a little more perceptive and careful when
it comes to misinformation but this is a mind battle it's going to take five or ten years before we win it and we win it we will because all of you that you and me are as much creators as we are consumers of content on this dynamic internet so the next question is what can you do to fight this menace well I've got four tips first if it's about a miracle cure for cancer remember that it's not going to first land in your whatsapp inbox right you're going to see it all over find a trusted
media organization second please be skeptical and disbelieving about videos and images in general and it's going to get worse use google reverse image search we use it it's simple to use it works beautifully third and importantly teach children about the Internet it's not all that it seems learn how to build trust learn how to use information carefully and to have to be careful and disbelieving when when the time comes and finally if you have people sending you fake messages frequently and it's upsetting you please return it to them with compliments thank you you [Applause]