India’s villagers are smarter than its city slickers when it comes to fake news
How many times have we lost track of our destination among the wooded mountains where the GPS has played truant? And how many times have locals come to the rescue? Technology doesn’t always work and if the survey by the Digital Empowerment Foundation is anything to go by, then Whatsapp users in rural India do not blindly trust messages they receive, simply because they share trust with what they can see and feel and not what is fed to them. Though the survey seems to skim the surface a bit, what with a sample size of only 1,018 users, the fact that subjects are from far-flung places like Barmer in Rajasthan, Bettiah in Bihar and Warangal in Telangana, seems to be a good enough indicator of their innate wisdom, something that has foxed psephologists when analysing electoral verdicts. Only eight per cent of the respondents marked 10 as their trust score on a scale of 1-10, where 1 stands for complete distrust and 10 for complete trust. This is perhaps also a pointer to the fact that it is much more difficult to convince the rural voter than the urban voter, the latter cresting the wave of perception, the former clutching on to ground reality. This is certainly not good news for political parties, who largely load their propaganda tools on social media platforms, hoping to generate a swell of opinion in their favour. Last heard, much of the campaigning for the panchayat polls happens on WhatsApp.
It has, in fact, become the direct tool of communication with a huge voter base. Data shows that the share of active WhatsApp users in rural India has doubled since 2017, according to a survey done by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Post this penetration, at least 30 people have been lynched since May, ostensibly acting on fake reports and videos being circulated on the sharing platform about child lifting and thefts. Perhaps, the horrendous outcomes of fake news have now triggered defence mechanisms among the rural populace, considering the victims have been among their own, and forced them to rethink if they are not being used as cannon fodder for political tussles. Collective mistrust could explain why about 66 per cent of rural users do not access this platform for news consumption despite spending up to four hours on it daily. Also, the countryside is still conservative when it comes to news consumption, used to the older media purveyors like vernacular newspapers and television. This is borne out by the survey finding that around 38 per cent users are active on up to five WhatsApp groups, the majority being in groups with friends, followed by work colleagues, and family. If these figures are true, then it means that WhatsApp in outlier towns and villages continues to be primarily a tool for socialisation. Anyway, the watchdogs and Government, who worried about the circulation of fake news on this platform, may breathe easy though there is a need for a deeper survey.
