Beyond the truth

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If you have been reading, watching or listening to the news over the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the term ‘fake news’. You have, perhaps, also heard about the possibly terrifying consequences of the uncontrolled spread of fake news: the subversion of democracy in countries like Nigeria and Kenya, say, and even the destruction of life in countries such as Myanmar and India.

But why does the ordinary citizen share fake news? If we agree that most people do not really intend to cause widespread harm and neither are they ignorant nor unwise, why would they still share fake news on social media and chat apps?

As our research project in India, Nigeria and Kenya – conducted with Third Eye, Flamingo and Synthesis – found, more often than not, the act of sharing fake news on WhatsApp and/or Facebook is not about the transmission of information. It is about the projection of people’s selves and beliefs, and it is about doing their civic duty in sharing information of perceived value (especially when there is a lack of trust in media in politically polarised environments).

Technology has made sharing of information – and misinformation – easier than ever, while consumption, reflection and deep learning are as mentally labour intensive as ever. Because of the volume of information people have to process, they have to resort to cognitive shortcuts or heuristics in assessing how valid and shareable the information is. This creates gaps that easily allow fake news to pass through.

However, while fake news is prevalent in both India and the African markets studied, its nature and the reasons for its spread differ. In the politically polarised climate of India, the sharing of fake news becomes a way of validating and projecting one’s own socio-political identity.
Therefore, the accuracy of the information shared is often of secondary importance. Or, often it’s not the factual truth that matters as much as the emotional truth of the piece of information.

In India, four types of fake news messages are particularly effective at bypassing the critical filters of a wide swathe of the citizenry: Hindu power and superiority; cultural preservation and revival; progress of India as a nation and associated national pride; and finally, the personality and prowess of prime minister Narendra Modi.

Note, though, that this need not be limited to people on any one side of the political spectrum. When it comes to messages around nation building and the progress that India is making in the world, people of all political persuasions share these messages without verification. It’s also worth acknowledging that the act of verification is cognitively difficult – and in many cases, people simply do not even know how to verify.

In India, we see that if someone you trust has sent you information, you share it without worrying too much about its authenticity, or where it originated from. You don’t even attempt to verify it, because frankly, when you are bombarded with so much information, just how many times a day could you possibly do that? Sometimes, when you are uncertain about the information provenance, you share it in your network hoping someone you trust will verify it. Paradoxically, though, you have ended up spreading fake news.

The situation is compounded in India by the prevalence of memes and images – especially via WhatsApp and Facebook groups – as a key format of fake news, rather than online articles (which are, in some ways, easier to detect and prevent spreading). Structural factors are important in this: in India, the precipitous drop in data costs in just a couple of years has removed a barrier to the widespread viewing and sharing of content – abetting the spread of fake images and videos, alongside genuine ones.

However, in Nigeria and Kenya, data costs are still a barrier – and partly because images and video use more data, sharing of information and misinformation is largely still limited to text. Text information is, in some ways, easier to verify, and we see that citizens in Nigeria and Kenya are keener to get to the actual origin or source of the information than their peers in India. In fact, in both of these markets, we found that younger citizens are really eager not to spread information that has the potential to cause harm, especially fake news messages that seek to widen rifts among tribes or religions.

The messages most resonant in the fake news ecosystem are not the most societally polarising ones, but scams and scares. But citizens in both Kenya and Nigeria, while much more cognisant of the risks of spreading fake news, also tend to overestimate their ability to spot it.

It’s all too easy to think about fake news as something that happens to other people – those less aware, less media literate, less pick-your-attribute. But the convergence of rapidly developing technology, polarised political environments and the cognitive limitations of human beings guarantees that, at some point, each and every one of us is unwittingly likely to share or fall victim to some colour of fake news. Fake news is not a purely technological phenomenon but a social, political, and psychological one, given extra wings by technology. And the only way to address it is to address the underlying socio-political underpinnings of the phenomenon.

• Coverage of fake news in the Indian media grew by nearly 200% between 2015-2018
  
• Two significant categories of fake news shared within private networks in India are ‘scams and scares’ ( 37%) and ‘national myths’ ( 30%)*
  
• But media reporting on fake news related to ‘scams and scares’ constitutes only 0.7% of coverage
  
• The motivations for sharing fake news in India are: to verify within the networks; civic duty; nation building; and expression of socio-political identity.

* Indicative only. According to the researchers’ analysis of the corpus of WhatsApp and Facebook messages collected during the fieldwork

Santanu Chakrabarti is head of audience insight at BBC World Service

Reference:

Both the India and Nigeria/Kenya full reports are available at bbc.co.uk/mediacentre