Dear Member,
Welcome also to new Member Sean Young, a master’s student in International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, with three years of journalism and content moderation experience. He worked at Pixstory in India, and before that The Sunday Guardian, Asian News International and The Asian Age.
New WhatsApp University enrolments in India have been outstripping any private university or IIT. So we thought we’d take an evidence-based approach to quantifying the prevalence of fake news in India.
As a preamble, here’s a blog that Member Pratik Dattani wrote for the LSE website: How to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and build societal resilience against fake news.
Boom is one of the prominent IFCN fact-checkers in India, and we used data from their annual report for 2022 for this newsletter. There are lots of other fact-checkers too, so their data may be different. It’s important to note that Boom’s data is based on claims they specifically fact-checked, rather than full universe of fake news.
Muslims were the most targeted religious group of false claims last year, followed by Hindus, targeted by 14% and 4% of all the claims they debunked last year, respectively. Most of these claims were found to be shared with the intent of spreading demographic anxiety and furthering polarisation among India's biggest religious groups.
Among the political parties, the BJP (and its leaders) turned out to be the most frequent target of false claims (16%), followed by the Congress (7%) and AAP (5.4%).
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