DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Social Media Fake News in India

  • Al-Zaman, Md. Sayeed (Jahangirnagar University)
  • Received : 2020.09.12
  • Accepted : 2020.12.10
  • Published : 2021.02.28

Abstract

This study analyzes 419 fake news items published in India, a fake-news-prone country, to identify the major themes, content types, and sources of social media fake news. The results show that fake news shared on social media has six major themes: health, religion, politics, crime, entertainment, and miscellaneous; eight types of content: text, photo, audio, and video, text & photo, text & video, photo & video, and text & photo & video; and two main sources: online sources and the mainstream media. Health-related fake news is more common only during a health crisis, whereas fake news related to religion and politics seems more prevalent, emerging from online media. Text & photo and text & video have three-fourths of the total share of fake news, and most of them are from online media: online media is the main source of fake news on social media as well. On the other hand, mainstream media mostly produces political fake news. This study, presenting some novel findings that may help researchers to understand and policymakers to control fake news on social media, invites more academic investigations of religious and political fake news in India. Two important limitations of this study are related to the data source and data collection period, which may have an impact on the results.

Keywords

References

  1. Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-236. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211
  2. Alt News. (n.d.). Methodology for fact checking. Alt News. https://www.altnews.in/methodology-for-fact-checking/
  3. Al-Zaman, M. S. (2019). Digital disinformation and communalism in Bangladesh. China Media Research, 15(2), 68-76. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8s6jd
  4. Al-Zaman, M. S. (2020, February 15). Telling good lies: Digital rhetoric and rumor in Bangladesh. South Asia Journal. http://southasiajournal.net/telling-good-liesdigital-rhetoric-and-rumor-in-bangladesh/
  5. Al-Zaman, M. S., Sife, S. A., Sultana, M., Akbar, M., Ahona, K. T. S., & Sarkar, N. (2020). Social media rumors in Bangladesh. Journal of Information Science Theory and Practices, 8(3), 77-90. https://doi.org/10.1633/JISTaP.2020.8.3.6
  6. Arun, C. (2015). On WhatsApp, rumours, and lynchings. Economic and Political Weekly, 54(6), 30-36.
  7. Bali, A., & Desai, P. (2019). Fake news and social media: Indian perspective. Media Watch, 10(3), 737-750. https://doi.org/10.15655/mw/2019/v10i3/49687
  8. Banaji, S., Bhat, R., Agarwal, A., Passanha, N., & Sadhana Pravin, M. (2019). WhatsApp vigilantes: An exploration of citizen reception and circulation of WhatsApp misinformation linked to mob violence in India. Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/104316/
  9. Brennen, J. S., Simon, F. M., Howard, P. N., & Nielsen, R. K. (2020). Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation. University of Oxford.
  10. Carlson, M. (2009). The reality of a fake image news norms, photojournalistic craft, and Brian Walski's fabricated photograph. Journalism Practice, 3(2), 125-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512780802681140
  11. Chaturvedi, S. (2016). I am a Troll: Inside the secret world of the BJP's Digital Army. Juggernaut Publication.
  12. Derczynski, L., Bontcheva, K., Lukasik, M., Declerck, T., Scharl, A., Georgiev, G., & Twerp, S. J. (2015). PHEME: Computing veracity-The fourth challenge of big social data. Proceedings of the Extended Semantic Web Conference EU Project Networking Session. 2nd International Workshop on Rumours and Deception in Social Media (RDSM), Italy. http://derczynski.com/sheffield/papers/pheme-eswc-pn.pdf
  13. Difonzo, N., & Bordia, P. (2006). Rumor psychology: Social and organizational approaches. American Psychological Association.
  14. Duffy, A., Tandoc, E., & Ling, R. (2019). Too good to be true, too good not to share: The social utility of fake news. Information, Communication & Society, 23(13), 1965-1979. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1623904
  15. Farooq, G. (2018). Politics of fake news: How WhatsApp became a potent propaganda tool in India. Media Watch, 9(1), 106-117. https://doi.org/10.15655/mw/2018/v9i1/49279
  16. Guacho, G. B., Abdali, S., Shah, N., & Papalexakis, E. E. (2018). Semi-supervised contentbased detection of misinformation via tensor embeddings. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2018, 322-325. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508241
  17. Haque, M. (2019, June). "Fake news" in social media: Conceptualizing, detection and finding ways of prevention. Nirikkha, 223, 9-18.
  18. Higdon, N. (2020). What is fake news? A foundational question for developing effective critical news literacy education. Democratic Communique, 29, 1-18. https://journals.flvc.org/demcom/article/view/121283
  19. Islam, M. S., Sarkar, T., Khan, S. H., Mostofa Kamal, A.-H., Hasan, S. M. M., Kabir, A., Yeasmin, D., Islam, M. A., Amin Chowdhury, K. I., Anwar, K. S., Chughtai, A. A., & Seale, H. (2020). COVID-19-related infodemic and its impact on public health: A global social media analysis. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 103(4), 1621-1629. https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.20-0812
  20. Jaster, R., & Lanius, D. (2018). What is fake news? Versus, 2(127), 207-227. https://doi.org/10.14649/91352
  21. Jo, D. G. (2002). Diffusion of rumors on the Internet. The Information Society Review, 2002, 77-95.
  22. Kadam, A. B., & Atre, S. R. (2020). Negative impact of social media panic during the COVID-19 outbreak in India. Journal of Travel Medicine, 27(3). https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/taaa057
  23. Kapferer, J.-N. (1992). How rumors are born. Society, 29(5), 53-60. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02697095
  24. Kaur, K. (2019, March 2). IFCN Code of Principles. IFCN. https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/application/public/pravda-mediafoundation/D27BB43D-D8FC-F85B-1C25-2AF73DF3A12C
  25. Keelery, S. (2020a). Impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on media consumption in India as of March 2020, by type of media. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113485/india-coronavirus-impact-onmedia-consumption-by-media-type/
  26. Keelery, S. (2020b). Number of social network users in India from 2015 to 2018 with a forecast until 2023. Statista. https://statista.com/statistics/278407/number-ofsocial-network-users-in-india/
  27. Khan, S. A., Alkawaz, M. H., & Zangana, H. M. (2019). The use and abuse of social media for spreading fake news. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Automatic Control and Intelligent Systems, I2CACIS 2019 - Proceedings, 145-148. https://doi.org/10.1109/I2CACIS.2019.8825029
  28. Meel, P., & Vishwakarma, D. K. (2019). Fake news, rumor, information pollution in social media and web: A contemporary survey of state-of-the-arts, challenges and opportunities. Expert Systems with Applications, 112986. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2019.112986
  29. Menon, S. (2020, June). Coronavirus: The human cost of fake news in India. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53165436
  30. Mosseri, A. (2017, April 7). Working to stop misinformation and false news. Facebook Media. https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stopmisinformation-and-false-news
  31. Muigai, J. W. W. (2019). Understanding fake news. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications (IJSRP), 9(1), 29-38. https://doi.org/10.29322/IJSRP.9.01.2019.p8505
  32. Mukherjee, R. (2020). Mobile witnessing on WhatsApp: Vigilante virality and the anatomy of mob lynching. South Asian Popular Culture, 18(1), 79-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2020.1736810
  33. Nielsen, R. K., & Graves, L. (2017). Audience perspectives on fake news. Reuters Institute, 1-8. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017- 10/Nielsen&Graves_factsheet_1710v3_FINAL_download.pdf
  34. Mezaris, L. Nixon, S. Papadopoulos, & D. Teyssou (Eds.). Video verification in the fake news era. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-26752-0
  35. Ninan, S. (2019, June 7). How India's media landscape changed over five years. The India Forum. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/how-indias-media-landscapechanged-over-five-years
  36. Ouedraogo, N. (2020). Social media literacy in crisis context: Fake news consumption during COVID-19 lockdown. SSRN Electronic Journal, 1-43. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3601466
  37. Parikh, S. B., & Atrey, P. K. (2018). Media-rich fake news detection: A survey. Proceedings - IEEE 1st Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, MIPR 2018, 436-441. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPR.2018.00093
  38. Quandt, T., Frischlich, L., Boberg, S., & Schatto-Eckrodt, T. (2019). Fake news. In The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (pp. 1-6). American Cancer Society. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0128
  39. Raj, A., & Goswami, M. P. (2020). Is fake news spreading more rapidly than COVID-19 in India? Journal of Content, Community and Communication, 11(10), 208-220. https://doi.org/10.31620/JCCC.06.20/15
  40. Rodrigues, U. (2020). Can India's media shield the election from fake news? East Asia Forum. http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30136200
  41. Shin, J., Jian, L., Driscoll, K., & Bar, F. (2018). The diffusion of misinformation on social media: Temporal pattern, message, and source. Computers in Human Behavior, 83, 278-287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.02.008
  42. Sukhodolov, A. P., & Bychkova, A. M. (2017). Fake news as a modern media phenomenon: Definition, types, role of fake news and ways of counteracting it. Theoretical and Practical Issues of Journalism, 6(2), 143-169. https://doi.org/10.17150/2308-6203.2017
  43. Sutaria, S. (2020). Coronavirus misinformation in India is not limited to health misinformation. https://meedan.com/reports/coronavirus-misinformation-inindia-is-not-limited-to-health-misinformation/
  44. Tandoc, E. C., Jr., Lim, Z. W., & Ling, R. (2018). Defining "fake news:" A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital Journalism, 6(2), 137-153. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143
  45. Tandoc, E. C., Jr., Lim, D., & Ling, R. (2020). Diffusion of disinformation: How social media users respond to fake news and why. Journalism, 21(3), 381-398. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919868325
  46. The Economist. (2020, October 22). In Myanmar, Facebook struggles with a deluge of disinformation. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/10/22/in-myanmar-facebookstruggles-with-a-deluge-of-disinformation
  47. ToI. (2020, July). Coronavirus myth vs. fact: WhatsApp forward claiming turmeric and black pepper home remedy to cure COVID-19 is fake. Times of India (ToI). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/healthnews/coronavirus-myth-vs-fact-whatsapp-forward-claiming-turmeric-andblack-pepper-home-remedy-to-cure-covid-19-isfake/photostory/76995286.cms
  48. Udupa, S. (2016). Archiving as history-making: Religious politics of social media in India. Communication, Culture & Critique, 9(2), 212-230. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12114
  49. Udupa, S. (2017). Viral video: Mobile media, riot and religious politics. In S. Udupa & S. D. McDowell (Eds.), Media as politics in South Asia (pp. 190-205). Routledge.
  50. US 2020: Another Facebook disinformation election? (2019). Avaaz. https://avaazimages.avaaz.org/US_2020_report_1105_v04.pdf
  51. Wardle, C. (2017, February 16). Fake news. It's complicated. First Draft. https://firstdraftnews.org/latest/fake-news-complicated/
  52. Watson, J., & Hill, A. (2006). Dictionary of media and communication studies. A&C Black.
  53. Wheaton, G. C. (2018). Birthers, hand signals, and spirit cooking: The impact of political fake news content on Facebook engagement during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Virginia Tech.
  54. Wu, L., & Liu, H. (2018). Tracing fake-news footprints: Characterizing social media messages by how they propagate. Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 637-645. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159652.3159677
  55. Zhou, X., & Zafarani, R. (2020). A survey of fake news: Fundamental theories, detection methods, and opportunities. ACM Computing Surveys, 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/3395046

Cited by

  1. Motivation Versus Intention of Sharing Fake News Among Social Media Users during the Pandemic - A SEM Model vol.20, pp.2, 2021, https://doi.org/10.17477/jcea.2021.20.2.040