India

• Digital space as a place of enlightenment – that is the vision of the free Internet. But digital exchange also gives rise to its ugly downside: digital echo chambers filled with lies and half-truths, from which waves of violence wash into our midst.

Such fake news campaigns, which sow discord and hatred, begin with a seemingly innocuous message, photo or video. Doesn't this clip clearly show that the leader of the opposition is late for the swearing-in of parliament, that he has no respect for the country? Or the one where the man spits in the glass of his superior: Isn't this the "spitting jihad", a perfidious act by the Muslim minority against the majority society? Or the footage of the old man lying arm in arm with a little girl in the tall grass – proof that child abuse is part of Islamic culture?

These are all recent examples of deliberate lies being spread in India, where disinformation is more rampant than in any other country in the world. It is manipulated or deliberately misleading information designed to harm people.

In fact, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was not late for the parliamentary session as the video suggests. The spitter was not a vengeful Muslim but a mentally ill Hindu. And the alleged assault was a harmless scene from a Pakistani TV series à la Heidi. Those who circulated the videos knew this. Their audience did not. Once published, such malicious tweets, Whatsapp messages and Instagram posts reach millions of people and poison the discourse.

Disinformation is a growing threat. According to a survey of experts by the World Economic Forum, the Global Risk Report 2024, the spread of fake news is the biggest long-term risk to societies around the world – ahead of the effects of the climate crisis and wars.

And this is particularly true for India, the country most affected by disinformation, according to the World Economic Forum. This is because online lies often have bloody consequences. In 2018, for example, two dozen people were killed because a video warning of kidnappers went viral. The footage was taken from an educational video by a Pakistani children's charity and edited so that only the message remained: Beware of strangers who steal your children! Five friends on a motorbike tour through rural southern India fell victim to this fake news: they were attacked by an angry mob of hundreds of villagers. One man – a 32-year-old software engineer from Hyderabad – was killed and the others seriously injured. And this is not an isolated incident.

"The majority of people in India today have access to mobile and internet services for the first time in their lives. And they  are simply not able to tell which information is authentic and which is not", software engineer and journalist Pratik Sinha states. Most misinformation is spread through videos. And what Indians see and hear is mostly incitement against the political opposition and the Muslim minority. 

Pratik Sinha wants to break the waves of disinformation. Together with Mohammed Zubair, another software engineer, he founded Alt News seven years ago. The organisation provides information about disinformation campaigns on its website and social media platforms.

Sinha started fact-checking in 2013. He used his Facebook page and Twitter account to investigate dubious political statements. For him, he says, it was a way of confronting the vindictive politics of Narendra Modi, who was then rising from Gujarat's chief minister to becoming India's president.

After four children from the oppressed Dalit community were beaten by an angry mob in Gujarat in 2016, Sinha organised protest marches (see also: The accountant of the oppressed). "The media hadn't picked up the case at all – it was only when we posted videos online that coverage started", Sinha says. "I realised then that I didn't want to continue working as a software engineer, but that I wanted to do other work." 

That decision marked the beginning of a new life as a public figure, an influential and threatened journalist. But Pratik Sinha is not a sentimental storyteller - the focus on facts is also evident in conversations with him.

At the time, he was already in touch online with Mohammed Zubair, who also ran a private fact-checking page on Facebook. The two joined forces, quit their jobs and started Alt News in 2017 – a two-man organisation that wanted to keep the flag of enlightenment flying high while large parts of the Indian media seemed to have given up. Although there are more than 20,000 daily newspapers and around 450 private TV channels in India, critics say the media landscape is not very diverse. This is partly due to the fact that the Indian government is the biggest advertising client, which means that coverage is not very critical of the government. The country fell from 140th in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking in 2014 to 159th in 2024, behind Pakistan and only three places ahead of Russia. 

Pratik Sinha says that in their day-to-day work at Alt News, he and his team can often see how false reports on social media are picked up and elevated by major media companies. For example, the fact-checkers found that the India Today Group, which owns the most-watched Hindi news channel Aaj Tak, spread false news in 23 cases in 2022.

In addition to technical errors, fear of criminalisation also affects the quality of journalistic work. According to the Indian Committee to Protect Journalists, 21 journalists were imprisoned between 2014 and 2023. In the nine years before the Modi government, there were four.

In spite of this threatening situation, Alt News is not afraid to name and shame: "We often can't trace disinformation back to its source", Sinha says. "But we can see who benefits from the disinformation – and in the absolute majority of cases, it is the government." Much of the disinformation in circulation comes from those around Narendra Modi's BJP, he says, as his daily work shows. This is backed up by an investigation by the Washington Post, which believes there is a network of more than 150,000 people working on social media campaigns for the ruling party's IT department, the so-called BJP IT Cell. BJP officials admitted to the Washington Post that the party secretly works with trolls to create inflammatory posts.

Given the Hindu nationalists' enormous media influence, it is surprising that they lost parliamentary seats and political power in the most recent elections in spring 2024. Sinha explains: "The contradiction between the political narrative of prosperity and progress and the reality of inflation and mass unemployment was so great that many voters decided otherwise.”

Is this a sign that the Indian people are less susceptible to manipulation? Sinha is sceptical: "Yes, you can't sugar-coat inflation for long. But most of the disinformation in India is aimed at defaming the Muslim minority. Fear and hatred of Muslims can win many voters without actually improving the economic situation of people in the country.”

Clarity in criticism must therefore be the standard for all journalists in India, Sinha comments. Precisely because the situation is so ominous. "We measure fact-checkers by whether they check the statements of those in power", he says. In his opinion, the Misinformation Combat Alliance, which was formed before the elections and brings together 16 media outlets and organisations, is not critical enough – of the government or of the platforms such as Meta and Google that help fund it. Sinha sees it this way: "If a crime has happened and there are two suspects, and now one suspect is giving money to the other to solve the case – what can you expect from such investigations?"

Alt News has no big backers behind it. "Institutions don't give us money. It's too dangerous for them", Sinha says, "but individuals do support us. Some send larger amounts, but sometimes we get as little as ten rupees from students who find our articles important." Alt News says it receives the equivalent of 15,000 euros in donations every month. This pays for the work of its twelve staff, most of whom are trained journalists. The fact-finders are proud of the support they receive from the interested Indian public. "We don't know much about our readers, only that they are pro-democracy", Sinha says.

The fact that their work is also recognised abroad was demonstrated in 2022, when Alt News was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee honoured Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha for their fight against religious extremism and intolerance in India.

But as Alt News becomes better known and recognised, the pressure is mounting. Insults are the least of their problems, Sinha asserts. The biggest threat is defamation suits. For example, Mohammed Zubair was arrested in June 2022 and charged with "promoting enmity between different groups" and "intentionally and maliciously hurting religious feelings". 

His offence: he had posted a photo of a hotel on Twitter four years earlier. It read: "Before 2014: Honeymoon Hotel. After 2014: Hanuman Hotel" – a joke about the rise in religiosity (Hanuman is a Hindu deity) following the election of Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government. For this harmless joke, Mohammed Zubair was detained for 23 days. 

But the Alt News team will not be stopped. On the contrary, it is stepping up its involvement with the organisation AltEd, which was founded in 2022. Three employees organise project weeks in schools or community centres to teach media skills to children and adults. More than 1,500 participants have already learnt how to trace the origin of photos and videos, find out when a news item was created or reconstruct the original context of a piece of information. "It's all about critical thinking, which our colleagues at AltEd are encouraging in children as young as 12", Sinha says.

An important aim of this educational work is to raise awareness of the negative influence of platforms such as Twitter and Meta, "to show that they are political and economic players who make money from disinformation," says Sinha. The fatal role of internet companies in the spread of fake news has now been scientifically proven, but the platforms are not changing their practices. At Twitter, now known as X, the takeover by Elon Musk has led to facts being drowned out by a flood of fake news and hate speech, and even the EU Commission has denounced the poor balance between lies and truth on the platform.

On Meta, the dissemination of disinformation is even aggressively defended: posts by politicians should not be verified, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with CNBC in 2020. Because: "Political speech is one of the most sensitive areas in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians are saying."

"This may be a noble goal in the US, but for countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, this attitude is fatal", counters Pratik Sinha. In the global south, politicians are not nearly as closely scrutinised by the press and the judiciary as they are in the United States or Europe. "It is simply dangerous if we are all dependent on platforms that act as if the whole world is San Francisco", he says.

Sinha therefore emphasises decentralised platforms such as Peertube, which are independent of corporations. "I am currently talking to many Youtubers who are already maintaining a critical public sphere in India", says Sinha. He advises them to add a 30-second message at the end of their videos: “If this Youtube channel is ever censored, keep watching here on Peertube." Pratik Sinha hopes that something new will emerge from the ruins of the old media system, places of knowledge transfer, respectful exchange, in short: enlightenment.

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To series: India – A country on the move