Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)

Bengaluru, Jul 10: In this era of digitization and communication, information keeps pouring in at such an alarming speed and quantities that it is impossible to sort out the genuine ones from the others. Even many news channels seem to be in a tearing hurry to reach the people with breaking news items that they air news which is later proved to be grossly false. The matter has been reaching such alarming proportions that people find it very difficult to believe or not the health research feedback they regularly get on Facebook, Whatsapp and other sites.

In the recent past, an English news channel had declared that in Kerala, ISIS had been converting women from other religions into Islam. As per this channel, Brahmin women commanded conversion price of five lac rupees, seven lac for Sikh girls and Rs 4.5 lac rupees for Kshatriya girls. These amounts reportedly were given to people who convince these girls to convert into Islam. The 'rate card' stated above that was claimed to be authentic was also published. However, later it transpired that the channel had failed to do a reality check before coming out with details, and they had just borrowed information from a WhatsApp message that was making the rounds.

In the recent past, there was information that people from a village in Jharkhand, who believed a widely circulated WhatsApp message containing details of kidnappers specializing in abducting small children, lynched seven persons after wrongly concluding that they were the culprits.

In another message, photo of a person in the company of his daughter, with red colour smeared on their faces, was circulated with the heading that both of them are happy after drinking the blood of cow and that they also had played Holi with cow's blood. The website, Boomlive, which investigated this information, learnt that it was just a simple selfie taken by a businessman from Egypt and that vested interests had smeared red colour on it before circulating it with inflammatory caption.

Sites like Alt News, Boomlive and S M Hoax Slayer have been silently working to remove the masks of messages which reach thousands of people through social websites in seconds, and try to lay bare the truth behind them. These sites have been doing the appreciable job of searching for provocative news items which get published through social websites, find out the truth, and bring before the people the ulterior designs of people who meddle with them and present a distorted version before the people.

Alt News founder, Pratheek Sinha from Ahmedbad, says that many have made it a practice to capitalize on popularity of controversial subjects that are in vogue, by releasing instigating messages about popular and controversial personalities like Narendra Modi, Yogi Adityanath, religious issues etc with an eye of earning through advertisements which naturally are seen by more and more people. He says that the people, instead of getting carried away by such news items, should make efforts to find out the truth.

It may be recalled that sale of plastic rice, plastic eggs, protest against Gau Rakshaks in Pakistan, stabbing of an RSS activist hundreds of times in Kerala, girl who married Muslim youth being burnt down for not agreeing to wear Burqa etc which had become viral during various periods were proved to be fake and that people had meddled with them to come up with weird news items to catch people's attention and earn advertisement revenue.