As the pandemic has spread across the world, so has disinformation. And with few mechanisms to curb the menace, the surge in fake news has spread fear and panic in India.
The messages seem, at times, innocuous. Like an unsigned message asking people to give a five-minute standing ovation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 12. Modi had to debunk it himself.
The fake news about the recent Tablighi Jamaat episode, which tried to portray a community in a certain way, was anything but harmless. As was the false information about resumption of train services, which led to thousands of migrant workers flooding the streets in Mumbai. “Disinformation is not innocuous,” said a senior intelligence official.
The national and state-level cyber security cells are buzzing with activity, working day and night to track and kill the disinformation virus. Forensic analysis is underway to trace the mischievous content related to the pandemic and to build a quick and effective counter narrative on social media.
According to a new report collated by intelligence agencies, 3,162 shady Twitter accounts popped up in 16 days during and after the Delhi riots in February.
An intelligence report THE WEEK accessed revealed how social media interventions based on false information led to actual protests on the ground during the recent citizenship law protests. Social media targeting of Indian students in Europe and the US prompted them to come out and protest in front of Indian missions there. According to the report, chartered buses were booked to ferry Indian students for many of these protests, and train tickets were reimbursed through the organisers by leaders of Pakistani diaspora associations. Forensic analysis has traced these social media handles, including @SohniS21, @NidiiM and @Afshan 2016, to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
The virus-related disinformation, however, seems to have overtaken all this, said the official. The Centre has launched a national cyber crime reporting portal, the Press Information Bureau has launched a PIB Fact Check page, and the home and information and broadcasting ministries have sensitised states and the public about unverified and misleading content. The government is also spreading awareness on multiple platforms, asking people to approach the police when they see fake news that could cause communal violence and social unrest.
Dr Muktesh Chander, senior IPS officer and former director of the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre, said that all states should create social media monitoring cells. “Why should we leave it to platforms like Alt News and news channels to come out with facts?” he asked. “By that time, the damage is already done. The police should take action against those spreading misinformation, and also get it blocked under the Information Technology Act.”
A state cyber cell official, who did not want to be named, said that states are more reactive than proactive, and that cyber cells are ill-equipped or understaffed. “There is a need for a 24-hour task force,” said the official. “This requires a convergent effort at the national level by incorporating all intelligence and law enforcement agencies, making the media accountable, and educating the society and social media users.”
Alt News founder Pratik Sinha, however, said that the government alone cannot be the nodal authority. “What the government does will always be subjective,” said the former software engineer. “How many people follow the PIB? I would rather have the mass media do it. Like the vaccination programme or the Swachh Bharat campaign, we need an awareness programme against disinformation. It needs to be part of the school curriculum. We need short- and long-term strategies.”
Sinha and his friends founded Alt News in 2017, and the site has since exposed thousands of fake news items. “We break videos into different frames,” he said. “Each frame is analysed using digital techniques and some old-school practices where we look at billboards to recognise the location. We then contact people or the police in that area to ask about that particular incident.”
There is a pattern to misinformation, he added. “Any event that has an emotional appeal is used by anti-national, anti-social elements and political forces to capture the narrative and inject misinformation in a way that will benefit them,” he said.
Dr Pavan Duggal, Supreme Court advocate and president of consultancy site cyberlaws.net, said the challenge is enormous because there is no international law on fake news. “It has been left to the subjective interpretation of different countries under the parameters of their existing national legislation,” he said. “India has sought to regulate fake news under the parameters of its cyberlaw, which is the IT Act, 2000.”
There are some countries, like Singapore, which have dedicated legislation on fake news, but many others do not. “Because the provisions of the IT Act, 2000, have not been specifically enforced against service providers who are publishing and disseminating fake news, an impression has started emerging that anyone can publish and disseminate fake news without fear of any legal consequences,” said Duggal, who is also chairman of the International Commission on Cyber Security Law.
Khushhal Kaushik, an ethical hacker who has helped police cyber cells crack cases of fraud, said that fake news is generated using artificial intelligence, tools such as Photoshop, websites that generate newspaper clippings and fake news creator apps. Deep fakes, where a person’s likeness is imposed on another person in a photo or video, are also widely used to mislead the public.
To hide their identity, fake websites are created in other countries; the articles are then spread using social media platforms. TikTok, for instance, has a weaker algorithm compared with more established applications, and cannot fact-check content, said Kaushik. This is why it is difficult to zero in on fake news on the platform. “To counter national security threats, we need to watch out for social media apps that can collect data without the user’s knowledge and promote false information,” said Kaushik.
Intelligence agencies are on their toes as they realise that fake news has the intrinsic ability to impact not just public order, but also cyber sovereignty. Analysis of material being fed to jihadi channels in India has revealed that the servers pushing them are located in the UAE, which are further connected to servers in Karachi. Similarly, online Khalistani propaganda, particularly that of Sikhs For Justice (SFS), has recently been traced to Karachi-based servers. The SFJ is banned in India.
Intelligence reports show that SFJ runs 14 websites hosted on the same server in Karachi, which run through the same content management system operated by a single company with the domain .pk, which can only be obtained through government intervention. Also worrisome was the fact that the same server was running several e-commerce websites.