By Harshita Singh, Spandan Tapader and Avni
No problem catches our attention until it’s affecting us. But what if there’s a huge unaddressed problem we all are living with?
Introduction
The demerits of fake news are not unknown, but do we really think there can be a considerable problem much more of a muchness than this? Misinformation is it! In this article, we tried our best and mentioned all the possible things you might want to know.
What is misinformation?
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.
With the rapid growth of the internet, it has become effortless to spread and consume misinformation, but we need to understand how this kills democracy and decreases its effectiveness.
To understand this issue deeply, our team member, Harshita Singh, recalls an incident.
“While the world was fighting Covid-19, some people were busy spreading fake news. I remember this one time my Aunt shared a news article stating that getting our covid-19 vaccine during our periods can affect our body, and I was like, how? Nowadays, people share any piece of news without even fact-checking and even when they come to know that this news is fake. They don’t bother to take action against it by just ignoring it.“
Misinformation doesn’t affect the common people but democracy as well. Disinformation also has far-reaching implications for human rights and democratic norms worldwide. It threatens freedom of thought, the right to privacy and the right to democratic participation, as well as endangering a range of economic, social and cultural rights. It also diminishes broader indicators of democratic quality, unsettling citizens’ faith in democratic institutions by distorting free and fair elections and fomenting digital violence and repression. At the same time, as governments and corporations begin to confront this issue more seriously, it is apparent that many of their counter-disinformation initiatives also sit uneasily with human rights and democratic standards. Disinformation undermines human rights and many elements of good democratic practice, but counter-disinformation measures can also have a prejudicial impact on human rights and democracy.
Our reporter Spandan Tapader also interviewed people. When asked if they had ever encountered any misleading news, they replied, “Yes, obviously I have encountered a lot of it, and it’s no strange to me.”
“Have you ever caught any news source red-handed using false facts?”
To this, they replied, “Yeah, I did; there was a new encounter with the finance minister of West Bengal claiming that West Bengal invested more than 10 lakh crore FDI since 2011, but our central government confirmed that only about 1000 crore in this financial year were invested.”
When asked what comes to their mind when they hear the word ‘misinformation’, they replied, “In my opinion, the term misinformation affects the people’s beliefs and trust. Many people tend to believe the news source, and after they realize that the news source turned up to be fake, it breaks their trust; if not busted, it still gives a wrong perspective.”
Then we asked how they verified if the news was correct or not.
“Well, after I read a news article which seems a little dubious, I cross-check it with various other news sources and check whether they covered it. If yes, I analyze the articles before trusting them.”
To answer if, in their opinion, the news sources judge the political situation fair and blindly, they replied by saying, “I always felt that they don’t accept few sources which cover the topics blindly at their own risk and against all the odds, and unfortunately they get overshadowed by the more popular new sources where the people of the same mindset gathers together and creates a bubble with their own opinion.”
As we have already talked about how the internet and social media profoundly impact our opinions and mindsets these days, we must know how we can not let it affect us. For that, we need to understand the concept of filter bubbles.
Sometimes referred to as an ‘echo chamber’, the filter bubble created by your online activity can limit your exposure to different points of view and weaken your ability to avoid fake news and bias, and this can negatively impact how we look at things because of these biased bubbles
