What Our Fake News Says About Us As A Nation

The terrifying world of Indian fake news was briefly off-kilter this past week when a viral story suggested that Sweden was planning a championship where sexual intercourse would be a sport. Media reports said the six-week long championship—managed by the Swedish Sex Federation—would offer 16 ‘types’ of sexual activity such as seduction, oral sex, penetration, etc. 

“The Kama Sutra, an ancient Sanskrit text popularly known as a book on eroticism, will also be taken into consideration by the judges. The participants will receive points based on their understanding of the ancient writings,” The Toronto Sun reported.

Lesson #1: Sex, especially its western practice, distracts us. But once it became clear that the Swedish sex story was fake, social media users went back to their homegrown and extremely lethal-to-democracy fake news concoction. It hit me just how bad the situation has become when my father, a well-read octogenarian who gets at least four daily newspapers delivered at home—but who is increasingly addicted to the television and his smartphone—asked me recently: “Does love jihad really exist?”

It no longer matters that the existence of this conspiracy theory was denied in Parliament in 2020 or that the Constitution allows Indians of all religions to friend, date, marry each other. Stories of violence against women are immediately bumped into a different category if the man is a Muslim and the woman, a Hindu. The focus is rewired to make it communal rather than what it really is: yet another violent attack on an Indian woman by an Indian man. At other times, a communal angle is proposed even when none exists (see here and here).

The Quint’s Fatima Khan recently reported that Muslim women seen with Hindu men were also, increasingly, experiencing harassment from gangs of men who claimed their agenda was to save these women from the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, the long-lost twin of the love jihad conspiracy. 

Ultimately, it is young people who are the losers as we use fake news and bigotry to distort every interfaith love story. As Sanjay Varma, a police inspector told Khan: “Dimagh ki gandagi hai (it’s the filth in their mind).” Lesson #2: The fake news we generate in our dirty minds around interfaith couples shows us how terrified we are of love. 

And Lesson #3—one that should have been amply clear when India claimed in 2020 that a meeting of Muslims in Delhi had spread the Covid pandemic across the country—love jihad is only one of the fake types of jihad being sold as a hard reality. We only believe this preposterous fake news because we are hopelessly Islamophobic. We hit a new low when pictures after a colossal train tragedy this past week that killed 275 people were edited to introduce a mosque at the site of the crash, saying it was the reason for the tragedy.

If other countries introduce laws to grapple with the reality of fake news (also a problematic exercise as we have seen in Turkey, which introduced a law against misinformation that critics said would further stifle free speech), we spread fake news until it has reached every crevice of the country and then use the prevalence of this misinformation to create new policies. The mainstreaming of love and land jihad are only two such examples.

In India, fake news flowers when anyone dissents. When a group of our top wrestlers demanded justice from their elected representatives, they were not prepared for the avalanche of fake news they would had to grapple with. 

“Our protest will continue, neither we have compromised, nor we will step back. All this is fake, we will not take back this protest. We will stay united and keep protesting for justice. Fake news is being spread to weaken us...," Satyawart Kadian, wrestler and husband of Olympian Sakshi Malik said, in response to rumours that the wrestlers had called off their protest.

Lesson #4, we will lie through our teeth to crush dissent. Even as the protesting wrestlers showed the world their grimmest, most stoic faces, someone decided it would be a great idea to use AI to plaster toothy smiles on their faces in a selfie they took after they were detained and being hauled away in a bus. 

The BBC said that the first manipulated image of the smiling wrestlers appeared only 90 minutes after the original picture was shared on Twitter, “accompanied by text in Hindi saying that the wrestlers should be ashamed of creating unrest just because they didn’t want to participate in the national games”.

Which brings me to Lesson #5: There is no easy way to extricate ourselves from this mud bath of fake news in the foreseeable future. Just like you spend time learning how to operate all the new features on your smartphone, it’s time you take responsibility to up your digital literacy. It’s the only way you’ll know fake from real. 

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.