On July 16, 2018, an IT worker Mohammed Azam visited a relative in Bidar district in Karnataka with three of his friends. They saw a few children returning from school to whom they gave Qatari chocolates out of affection.
However, suspecting them to be child-snatchers, the villagers turned hostile. The group fled in their car but the villagers called ahead to the next village and villagers there blocked the road.
Their car was flipped into a ditch. People then dragged the group of four only to beat them up with sticks and stones, killing Azam and injuring the other three.
On July 24, 2018, four women in West Bengal's Dawkimari village, Jalpaiguri, were injured in an assault by mobs on suspicion of being child-lifters.
On July 28, 2018, a 29-year-old man in Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, suspected of being a child kidnapper, was set upon by a mob wielding iron bars and bamboo rods.
Similar incidents occurred in Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Assam, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Tripura, Gujarat, and several other states, all owing to the suspicion of the victim being a child-lifter.
Everyone who's been following the news knows that this suspicion didn't just bloom out of nowhere, but was injected into people's brains through a message which was circulated on WhatsApp. The fake message claimed that there were child-lifters in that area and people should be alert.
It spread like a plague, and made people blind enough to turn on any random person trying to talk to or get associated with a child. Even parents who were out with their kids got attacked. Not only this, people got attacked because they weren't native to the area and were present there for some work.
Since neither the Indian government track incidents of public lynching nor the Indian Crime Records Bureau keeps data regarding their occurrences across India, we do not know the exact number of people who got lynched owing to fake news.
Why fake news propagates so fast on WhatsApp
In order to understand why fake news propagates so fast on WhatsApp, India Today Education talked to dozens of people from urban and semi-urban areas. And, some of them are hard-core WhatsApp users, who do not use any social media platform but rely solely on this messaging app.
Most of the people aged between 21 and 28 didn't forward the message. While they had different reasons for it, most of them didn't do it because they don't know how to verify the authenticity of a message and couldn't risk forwarding fake news.
This age group not only refrains from forwarding messages related to political claims and government policies but also messages carrying religious information and other things as such. Cases of lynching owing to fake news about child-lifters was heard and it played a great role in raising awareness and forming a trail of messages from one group to another.
Some people from this age group acknowledged that they do forward messages that they think are important, but only after proper verification.
While some people checked the authenticity of the messages on Google others took the following measures:
*Asking a person if they think they know about the matter
*Asking another person to verify the fact for them, whom they identify as a person who knows how to verify the info
*Checking the information on fake news buster websites like Alt News
There were also people who directly asked the message sender about its authenticity and reason behind forwarding it. If the sender said he/she had verified the info and it was 100 per cent correct, only then did they forward the message.
Another section of users aged between 30 and 48 accepted that they forward the message if they 'think' it is genuine, or if it 'feels like' it is genuine. They didn't know how to properly verify the info provided in a message but they claimed they have a general idea of what a fake message looks like.
When presented with some WhatsApp forwards, they managed to verify more than half of fake news based on their 'hunch', but one or two messages did manage to pass them.
Both of these age groups have one thing in common -- if the source is a person they think won't forward fake news, they not only believe it instantly but also forward it another WhatsApp group without thinking for a second.
What is driving people to forward misinformation
Upon analysing the people who were interviewed, it was evaluated that people who are less aware of news are more prone to forwarding fake news. When asked why they forward a message in the first place, they said that they don't want to keep an information to themselves in case it is true and affects people they know.
BBC also found this as one of the reasons why people spread fake news, in its research done in India, Kenya, and Nigeria as a part of its campaign 'Beyond Fake News'.
The report shows that nationalism is driving the spread of fake news in these countries.
"People in India are sharing fake news stories with nationalistic messages for 'nation building' purposes, with the consolidation of national identity taking precedence over the need to fact-check a story," found a BBC research.
The report examines networks within Twitter and analyses how people are sharing on encrypted messaging apps (like WhatsApp), after users gave BBC unprecedented access to their phones.
Following are the key findings from the report:
*In India, people are reluctant to share messages which they think might incite violence but feel duty bound to share nationalistic messages
*Fake news stories about India's progress, Hindu power, and revival of lost Hindu glory are being shared widely without any attempt at fact-checking
*In sharing these messages, people feel like they are nation building
*There is also a feeling of duty to share breaking news just in case it is true and could affect those in their networks
*A sense of duty to democratise access to information is also seen to be at play here
*Fake news is being unwittingly spread by people across India, Kenya, and Nigeria, as they forward messages in the hope that someone else will check the truth of the story for them
BBC's research also suggests that a significant amount of fake stories being shared are not written articles, but images and memes.