Did you recently win a $100000 lottery in your mail? How did the election results come out even before the counting started? We come across many such news pieces in a day. What are these & why do we receive them? 

Well, this can simply be called Yellow journalism or Hoax news. In layman’s language it is called “Fake News”. It is a piece of news that manipulates facts & presents itself as a bias, myth, conspiracy, or allegations. It is spread with political motives & agendas in the background. 

Media is one of the most dominant vehicles of Information in India as citizens do give a considerable time and attention to it. The lifestyle of masses has television and radio deeply inculcated in the daily regime of men and women, boys and girls. It holds the power to influence citizens in the most substantial ways because it is consumed by young and old, alike. 

A news piece spreads like wildfire through print, broadcast and even more so, through social media. It can twist the facts to attack a certain section of the society, and their beliefs. If it aims to destroy the peace and harmony in the environment and disturb the functioning of a smooth running government, it can. 

Political, religious, economical, and communal agendas can be realized through media, simply to spread unrest & hostility in the society because it meets the agenda of a group that might benefit with the unrest. Lately, owing to great many reasons, communal unrest is increasing by the day. Political parties coaxing media vehicles, attaining ownership of certain publications, news channels & local social media access have spread an immense amount of fear in the country. 

When the nation was slapped with the security and safety breach of women as the Nirbhaya rape case came to light, the social media was flooded with vile rumors about the girl, her way of lifestyle & her appearance. While nothing about her could justify what she was put through yet it was spoken. In another instance, a political party spokesperson said that there was television present in Mahabharata which allowed Sanjay to depict every movement of the battlefield to Dhritrashtra. Here, a fact & a myth were twisted to spread unwanted & false information about something that holds great importance to the society. 

Fake news leads a reader astray from the topic. It is successful each time one receives a WhatsApp forward that speaks of unusual cures, pranks of winning a lottery, videos edited to bring mutiny, communal indifference by wrongly interpreting religious scriptures, and so on. 

As the country is amidst a major lock down, certain news channels & publications have been spreading the news of a particular community spreading the disease through non-cooperation & religious spin. However, are these news pieces really true? Each message that circulates on the internet, does it have genuity & authenticity? 

News channels and social media handles of various media houses in India have been broadcasting videos that have been altered to propagate and create hate for various minorities in India. No religion, individual, caste, sect, or race deserves to be judged on the actions of certain misled members of the society. While this could be the dark side of a human design but the fact that it is allowed to not just surface but also grow and destruct, means there is a huge pitfall in surveillance, integrity and accountability. It means that the decision makers are careless, driven by negative agendas and are out of their own integrity. 

Fighting a pandemic has proved to be more difficult than thought about and in times like these, the country needs genuine information & not pseudo-news. Leaders at all level are urged to control fake news, people to stop consuming information that targets anyone in particular, even if it is stimulating and engaging. Fake news does not come with a red dot or a yellow band, it looks even more real than the real news, thanks to the creativity of its creators but are the rest of the people really dumb to not learn from the first, second, fifth and even the hundredth fake news that came, damaged and never lasted to be proved right?