WhatsApp Hand-Picked 20 Research Teams to Combat Fake News Shares

Recently, the fake news syndrome in India has been spreading its arms and legs, and already there has been a number of innocent victims to this menace. WhatsApp, one of the most popularly used real-time messaging platforms by Indian residents is majorly responsible for this. And WhatsApp is aiming at tracking the reasons and remedy for this frantic disease.

How many WhatsApp groups do you belong to? How many forwarded messages do you receive in a day? How many forwards do you make on WhatsApp? The answers vary depending on age, social stature, economic scenario and other factors. But what one cannot ignore is, every Indian WhatsApp user is more or less accountable for spreading hoax, false information or misleading updates.

And what is just some time-killing stuff for you, is actually killing innocent individuals across the nation. Till date, there have been 30 death incidents reported due to the spread of misinformation. And most importantly, the victims in all the cases were innocent.

This includes the miserable murders of two young men in Assam, who were lynched by mob mercilessly, for being mistaken to be child-lifters. In reality, they were friends travelling Assam on leisure holidays, who repeatedly attempted to convince the attackers, however, no one cared to pay heed!

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook has selected 20 teams from the global arena to delve deep into the origins of these deceptive forwards to come up with adequate solutions, after state government interference. The task has appointed people from Indian origins, especially.

Some of the teams are:

Shakuntala Banaji from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Anushi Agrawal and Nihal Passanha from Bengaluru-based media and arts collective "Maraa" and Ramnath Bhat from LSE have been hand-picked for the paper named "WhatsApp Vigilantes? WhatsApp messages and mob violence in India".

Vineet Kumar from Ranchi-headquartered Cyber Peace Foundation (principal investigator), Amrita Choudhary, President of the Delhi-based non-profit Cyber Cafe Association of India (CCAOI) and Anand Raje from Cyber Peace Foundation will work for "Digital literacy and impact of misinformation on emerging digital societies".

PN Vasanti from Centre for Media Studies in New Delhi will work with S Shyam Sundar, The Pennsylvania State University (Principal Investigator) to examine content modality in vulnerability to misinformation, under the topic titled "Seeing is Believing: Is Video Modality More Powerful in Spreading Fake News?"

FYI, the teams have been chosen from 600 application the chatting platform received this July, from every corner of the world. And each team assigned will be rewarded with up to $50,000.

Lipika Kamra from OP Jindal Global University and Philippa Williams from the Queen Mary University of London (Principal Investigator) will analyse the role of WhatsApp in everyday political conversations in India, in the context of India's social media ecosystem.

Sayan Banerjee from University of Essex, Srinjoy Bose from University of New South Wales and Robert A. Johns from University of Essex will attempt "Misinformation in Diverse Societies, Political Behaviour & Good Governance".

Santosh Vijaykumar from Northumbria University, Arun Nair from Health Systems Research India Initiative and Venkat Chilukuri, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology will study "Misinformation Vulnerabilities among Elderly during Disease Outbreaks".

But no matter effort is being put into by WhatsApp or the Indian Govt., we the people of India cannot deny our bit, no matter how small, if performed with certain liability can definitely curb such nonsensical, inhuman and unfortunate acts from happening in the near future.