There is so much junk floating on the internet and social media that it is our civic duty to clean it up and follow the way citizens rescued Mumbai’s Versova beach

Over the past week, I must have received several forwarded messages on WhatsApp and other messaging services. Some of them were really silly memes making fun of our politicians, irrespective of one’s political leanings. One must really appreciate the creative and sharp minds behind some of them. Of course, there are more “good morning” messages than I choose to recall. After two decades into the journalism profession and being spammed, I have become fairly adept at ignoring pointless messages after just reading the header. I have some 10,000 unread emails for a reason after all, possibly because I procrastinate deleting them. That, however, is not the point I want to make in this column.

The moot issue is that while the forwards received by me instantly activated my bullshit filters, a couple of them were particularly egregious. On a school group, where classmates keep cribbing about the current economic slowdown, one message in the form of an image popped up wherein it was claimed that after 72 years, the Indian Rupee had weakened against the Bangladeshi Taka.

Surprisingly, there were no facts to back up this assertion that can so easily be countered not just by a Google search — the search string would be “INR/BDT” in case one keeps wondering. Don’t look at “INR/USD” though. But there is also the rather simple fact that Bangladesh didn’t even exist as a sovereign nation until 1971, 48 years ago.

While I may doubt the general knowledge level of the public at large, every Indian schoolkid knows of 1971 as the finest hour of the Indian Army. We all also know that the Bangladesh war was fought to stop the genocide being perpetrated by the Pakistani Army and its allies. The 1971 war resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. Yet, I got this forward and while I have started to hold my tongue on most such groups, I had to pipe in and thankfully, so did several others, doubting the veracity of the information.

Now, the person who forwarded this message is not the smartest individual in the world. He was not in school and he isn’t now, as this message proves. But it was his reaction to the angst that this message raised, which was truly shocking. While I did not expect him to be apologetic, his reaction was, and I quote, “Dude, I don’t check messages, I just forward them.” Can we wonder how what we describe as “fake news” spreads? Just because we see a meme or even read a forward that subscribes to our views, we cannot immediately take it to be the gospel truth. If indeed something sounds fishy, we owe it to the people to whom the message is being forwarded to at least do a cursory check of the facts involved. We already have a smartphone for heaven’s sake.

This forward was, however, badly thought up and easily disproven. The next message was a bit off not just because of the facts it espoused but also the rosy feel-good blanketing it came wrapped in. The worse still, this came on a group of professionals. We have all read those lovely feel-good stories, the ones where one should never lose hope or others where something unexpected led to an invention. Two decades of adulthood have taught me that life really isn’t like that but these stories make for a nice read.

The problem is that most of them are made-up facts and pure fiction. This forward speaks of how a particular product was invented, mentions real companies and gives seemingly real dates. It all looked so believable until one just checked a single fact and it all fell apart. You might argue that if one assertion out of 10 in the forwarded message was wrong, it does not disprove it. 

Let me assure you that one single mistake can ruin the most comprehensive investigative story and one misstep by the prosecutor can keep a murderer free. This urban legend had far too many errors and mistakes for it to have been true, no matter how good it sounded.

Every single fact could have been searched easily online. If it had come from the sort of person who sent the first forward, I would have, I regret to say, ignored it. But because this came from someone with more than a modicum of intelligence, it was possibly more dangerous than the first, although there was no immediate malice involved unlike the political nature of the first forward.

I am sure that over the years, I might have received thousands of such forwards and genuinely, I did not have the time or the energy to ignore them properly. But these two instances were shocking and it makes one realise how quickly misinformation can spread, thanks to the callous nature of people.

Sometimes it is the first person who sends the same forward to 50 different people and turns fiction into fact. The second case is where someone you trust not to send you misinformation does exactly that. I called out both the cases and while the first individual was unapologetic, which is a bit scary, the second at least apologised and assured me that he had sent the message in “good faith.” I did ague that “good faith” barely exists anymore.

While one should not draw inference from these two instances, we all know how much misinformation floats around WhatsApp. Sitting with journalists and technologists at discussions, it might look like a slippery slope into an idiocracy. But we should all start doing our bit.

The fact is that in a country where expectations of justice are minimal, misinformation can kill. It is contingent on those of us, who consider ourselves well-read and informed, to correct mistakes or call misinformation on social media platforms.

Just like Afroz Shah got tired of the apathy and began the successful movement to clear the Versova Beach in Mumbai, something that has paid massive dividends with thousands of turtles hatching on the once trashy beach, we have to do the same on social media.

(The writer is Managing Editor, The Pioneer)