World News Day 2020: What the global journalism community can learn from fact checking in India

To glimpse the future of global news consumption, look to India — home to a sixth of the world’s population. A recent survey on India by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 68% of respondents identified smartphones as their main source of news; 82% were users of WhatsApp, with 52% of those people getting news on the platform.

With more than 400M users in India, WhatsApp is just one of the numerous private messaging apps with massive user bases, where people share and consume news — and as has been observed repeatedly — viral misinformation. This poses new challenges and opportunities for journalists, who since 2019 have been driving creative responses to engage audiences on these rapidly growing platforms.

In this environment building and sustaining an audience base is challenging for newsrooms even as it proves to be vital in addressing misinformation at scale, something that is essential with such high use of private messaging apps.

Reporters and editors in India are at the forefront of a new type of information delivery: one that is on- demand, fast, low-fi and has the potential to both inform and misinform without scrutiny. A new type of journalism is needed and it couldn’t matter more.

Using tiplines to engage audiences

Many newsrooms advertise phone numbers on their websites through which they regularly crowdsource content. Some newsrooms in India have also participated in a WhatsApp pilot that allowed people to send in leads for fact-checking from their WhatsApp accounts to a newsroom’s account. The idea behind seeking content through multiple sources is of course to get a broader sense of the misinformation trends across platforms and private-messaging networks. However, in the process newsrooms often find themselves saddled with large volumes of data that teams do not have the resources to deal with.

Fathm has worked with leading newsrooms in India to help them streamline their fact-checking workflows and offered them bespoke solutions to complement their scale of operations. That experience has shown us that it is imperative for a newsroom to clearly communicate with the audiences about their subject matter expertise, have a fast turnaround time for fact-checking and develop new formats and distribution strategies. This helps newsrooms in creating an identity for their brand of journalism.

Mutual skill and knowledge exchange

Even as fact-checking organisations compete with each other, there is a certain level of cohesion within the existing ecosystem. On large WhatsApp groups of fact-checkers, created primarily to exchange information on trainings and resources, members tend to notify each other if they spot a video, audio clip, or visual that has gone viral or has the potential to go viral. Sometimes that item is in a regional language as opposed to Hindi or English, and may have a subtext that is not widely understood, in such situations the language and cultural expertise that is voluntarily offered by members can be extremely useful in debunking any misinformation related to it.

There is a growing trend among fact-checking sites to publish reports in major Indian languages, such as Bengali, in addition to Hindi and English. A few new sites are also focusing on checking misinformation that is local to a particular region, such as southern India and at least a couple of newsrooms have expanded their operations to fact-check content from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar; publishing in Bengali, Sinhala, and Burmese respectively.

However, the job of Indian fact-checkers is often complicated by the fact that they are operating in a society deeply polarised on religious and political issues. It has been seen repeatedly in India that online hate has the potential to spill over to the streets and kill people. Fact-checking teams often find themselves dispelling viral false claims unleashed apparently as part of sustained disinformation campaigns targeting individuals in public life or members of a religious community.

Training at Scale

Indian journalists are rising to the challenges that a rise in misinformation presents. The number of fact-checking teams in India has substantially increased over the last two years. There are now 15 in the country that are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN); the most in one country. They have also had some help. Companies like Facebook and Google have invested heavily in training Indian journalists and journalism educators on fact-checking and verification.

Training on such a grand scale has the possibility to tip the balance. Journalists from both big and small newsrooms across India get taught by experts about the best practices, tools, and techniques on debunking. They take back those lessons and train their colleagues, organise workshops for fellow journalists at press clubs across India; and even engage with college and university students, offering them practical tips for identifying “fake news”. Some of these journalists have worked with leading Indian journalism schools to develop modules on media literacy and fact-checking so that students can enter the industry with a more diversified skillset. To date more than 20,000 people have been trained through Google’s programme alone, making it the largest network of its kind in the world.

Looking ahead

With misinformation taking myriad forms every day, the road ahead for Indian fact-checkers is bumpy, yet there is light at the end of the tunnel: there are new opportunities to collaborate on initiatives, develop tools and techniques to counter misinformation spread via private messaging apps and build public awareness. It is promising to see that people from non-journalistic backgrounds are eagerly joining fact-checking teams.

The rapidly growing cadre of fact-checkers in India play a crucial role in ensuring that the Indian public has access to credible and reliable news. There is much work to be done, but the pioneering work of Indian fact-checkers provides a helpful blueprint for the challenges and solutions that journalists around the world may benefit from in coming years.

World News Day aims to raise awareness of the critical role that journalists play in providing credible and reliable news, to help people make sense of — and improve — the rapidly changing world around them.

Written by Pamposh Raina with contributions from Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell.

To learn more about the work mentioned above please contact us: hello@fathm.co