Fight fake news to serve larger public interest, not protect State

To remedy the fake news pandemic, there is a need to fix the meaning of terms such as ‘fake’ and ‘misinformation’ in law that currently are vague and invite a range of meanings and interpretations

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 highlights India as a top country, for the second year running, at risk from misinformation and disinformation.

The report highlights the affinities between ‘Censorship and surveillance, societal polarisation, misinformation and disinformation and online harms, highlighting the confluence of these risks in the digital ecosystem’. 

The Government of India has the habit of dismissing such indices as anti-national propaganda and fake news. This ostrich-like behaviour can only reinforce the perception that India is an illiberal democracy veering towards authoritarian rule.

To some extent misinformation, disinformation, rumours, and fake news are passe in India. A WhatsApp-fuelled lynching might make the news. However, the cover-ups and the road blocks in the way of justice for the victims suggest that India’s deeply politicised judiciary is incapable of delivering justice for all ‘without fear or favour’. 

There is a distinction between partial or even false information meant to be a parody, and information that is deliberate, intentional, and foundationally meant to sow discord. Misinformation and disinformation in India belong to the second category. This is witnessed in frequent attempts to rewrite history based on falsities and factual inaccuracies.

However, with a censorious government, even parody invites censorship in India. 

This is what happened to the Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan which published a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in shackles after the deportation of undocumented Indians from the US.

To the government such parodies are a case of ‘fake news’ although the government itself is known to encourage fake news that bolsters its vision of the ‘greatness’ of India. 

There has been the commodification of fake news in India in a context in which its regulation is selective and episodic. There are influencers involved in fake news in every imaginable sector — such as the finfluencers (financial influencers) Asmita Jitesh Patel, dubbed as the ‘she-wolf of Stock Market’, and Ravindra Bala Bharti, who were both banned by the Securities and Exchange Board of India. 

In the context of Hindu nationalism, all sorts of ‘supernatural’ claims have become normalised — ancient rituals, Vedic purities and commodified practices. These are legitimised, for example, through the godman-entrepreneur Baba Ramdev and YouTubers such as Ranveer Allahbadia who was recently the subject of a Supreme Court intervention after he expressed ‘vulgar’, anti-family values on a comedy show. 

It is not as if there are no rules and regulations to deal with this explosion of fake news. There are.

These include, Section 69A of the Information Technology Rules, the Telecommunications Act 2023, the amended Rule 3(1)(b)(v) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (2023 Amendment), the Prohibition of Fake News on Social Media Bill, and Sections153 and 293, Indian Penal Code along with other clauses, are meant to provide the means to combat misinformation.

However, it seems that the legal provisions are meant to protect the government from ‘fake news’ rather than the citizens. 

In fact, the government is investing in an ecosystem to combat fake news about itself. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has attempted to establish a Fact Checking Unit at the Press Information Bureau meant to combat fake news of the government — a project that is to be regularised via amendments made to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 in April 2022. However, the judiciary put a stop to the move declaring the amendment to the IT Rule ‘unconstitutional’.

The botched attempt shows that in India the rule of law with respect to fake news is being weaponised and is sought to be applied selectively to silence those who are dubbed ‘anti-national’. 

There are, however, occasions when anti-minority fake news is proscribed. This happened, for example, when the ruling party’s spokesperson Nupur Sharma made derogatory ‘fake’ statements on the Prophet Muhammad that led to violence, pressure from friendly countries in the Middle East led to her suspension from the party. 

However, journalist and fact checker Mohammed Zubair who shared her outburst on Twitter was arrested. Critics point out that the timing suggests that this was linked to his widely-shared tweet that highlighted Sharma’s comments during a television debate.

Such perverse application of the law contributes to a ‘chilling effect’ since it increases possibilities for self-censorship and impacts negatively on the freedom of expression. 

Countries around the world are scrambling to create effective laws against fake news in a world in which AI-based deep fakes and partisan/fake news ecosystems flourish on the Internet. 

This is as true in the US as it is in India. In both cases, however, it would seem that the delegitimisation of core ideologies antithetical to the majoritarian worldview — woke in the United States and secularism in India — has been accompanied by major investments in ‘alt information’.

This ‘alt information’ in India is reflected in a range of attempts to revise and rewrite history from that of the Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar to the contributions of the Mughals, to the YouTubers, Instagrammers, WhatsApp and Facebook groups involved in peddling dubious histories, false remedies, and majoritarian solutions.

To remedy this fake news pandemic, there is a need to fix the meaning of terms such as ‘fake’ and ‘misinformation’ in law that currently are vague and invite a range of meanings and interpretations. The law also needs to be clear, applied consistently, and tied to the public interest rather than to the interest of the State. Most importantly, there is a need to de-weaponise fake news.

(Pradip Thomas is at the School of Communication and Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia.)

This article was first published under Creative Commons by 360info.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.