Fake News, WhatsApp, Politics

In his wonderful book, How to Win an Indian Election, Shivam Shankar Singh dedicates a chapter on fake news. One of his points was this:

“Most (rural) voters believed that being added to a political WhatsApp group gave them access to some kind of insider information.”

Ergo, they think of it as a “credible source”. Something to be repeated/forwarded.

We like to think that people vote based on rational, well thought reasons, but it’s all too often emotion based. Political parties know this and so try and exercise control over public opinion. By any and all means at their disposal.

Fake news feeds perfectly into human psychology. All of us have our biases and views, and a message that aligns with that tends to be accepted without too much (any?) scrutiny. More problematically, it reinforces our bias/view setting off a vicious cycle. And the effect is practically irreversible:

“The ugly truth is fake news does its job even when it is identified as fake.”

WhatsApp, everybody’s favorite whipping boy, has genuine problems dealing with this. After all, all communication is encrypted, which means they can’t “read” our messages and filter. But if they overturned that policy, we’ll be up in arms over privacy concerns. They simply can’t win, can they?

Then again, even without the encryption aspect, it doesn’t look like WhatsApp is serious about curbing fake news: its measures are so woefully inadequate. Measure like flagging messages as forwarded isn’t the same as saying, “reader beware”. Why convey the steps they take via newspaper and media ads, instead of the WhatsApp Messenger itself?

Can the government do something about it? (Let’s assume they wanted to for the sake of this discussion). How do they even proof check every news, post, video and pic? And even if they were able to do that, what next?

“Intent is impossible to prove.”

Did the guy innocently/stupidly post it thinking it was true? Or did he knowingly post fake news? How could you possibly prove anything?

But of course, nobody can proof check everything. Even worse:

“(It’s getting harder to identify fake) with technologies that allow for the doctoring of not just pictures and audio but also video recordings.”

And remember, fake and biased news isn’t limited to the Net. News media contributes to all this too:

“This new news dissemination model where media outlets run multiple channels with varying degrees of biases, allowing their audience to choose the bias they want in their reportage… (And so we get) a perverse form entertainment that masqueraded as news.”

While some of that is political, “market forces have wreaked havoc on the (media) industry” which now relies on “opinion-driven content and reality TV-worthy drama”. Plus, producing in-depth, informative reports means those companies have reporters and analysts with the necessary skills. And that costs money.

All of which leads to a self-feeding cycle with no incentives to stop:

“The problem is that fake news is such an effective tool for molding voters’ opinion that if one side is using it, it becomes incredibly difficult for the other side to think about winning an election without doing the same thing.”

So yes, we’re living in a post-truth world. But no, it can’t all be blamed on the right or WhatsApp or the news media alone: Our own natures are just as much to blame.