Bengaluru, Oct 29: Several media giants, who participated in the panel discussion on ‘Fake News: Whose lie is it anyway?’ during the Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday, expressed grave concern over the menace.
Pratik Sinha, co-founder of AltNews, an online fact-checking website, stressed on the role of social media in the spread of fake news. He said the broader issue was that of the excess of information brought about by increasing internet connectivity across the country.
Warning against downplaying the impact of WhatsApp and social media platforms, he said even in large parts of society that are offline, WhatsApp messages have a serious impact.
“It is the influential who can afford smartphones and their word carries weight. Thirty people were killed in recent times because of WhatsApp messages about alleged child-lifters. It is real,” he said.
Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor, The Hindu, said WhatsApp was probably the biggest vector of fake news today, and not just the uninformed, but even intelligent people could fall prey to it.
He said rather than waiting for technology solutions or government intervention, what would work was awareness among citizens “that not everything we see is true”.
He said that the pervasiveness of clickbait headlines in the world of instantaneous news, when everyone must be one nanosecond ahead of the other, had impacted journalism. “There is not much introspection over this,” he said, and advocated a culture of media houses learning to seek apology for mistakes and misinformation.
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