Modi NYT headline and "Fake News"

 I have something very perceptive to say.

A few days back (Sep 26 evening) an image of PM Modi circulated in social media. It was the day after his address to the UN.

This image had on top a fake NY Times headline. Below the image, in small letters, it said "His Highness, Modiji, is signing a blank A4 paper to bless our country..har har Modi"

Now, for anyone seeing this image, it was clear that it was snark because of the bottom caption. However, some BJP circles picked it up and it went through social media.

What happened next is very important: The NYT published a denial, saying it had never written such a headline. Scroll, Print, Quint and everyone else wrote articles which were headlined "NYT clarifies it didn’t call Modi the ‘last, best hope of earth’ as fake front page image goes viral".

Subsequently, social media users started writing about the fake news spread by the BJP IT Cell.

FB, on its part, labeled posts carrying that image as "false information".

If you came across any of these (scroll, NYT's denial, FB's warning), you would have thought that they were justifiably debunking disinformation.

But, the caption below clearly means that actual image was photoshopped not by the BJP IT Cell, but by people on the exact opposite side.

In fact, several of the articles that supposedly warned you about this fake image noted the caption right below, but appear to have failed to make the connection of what it meant to the context.

Therefore, just by misleading headlines about a fake image (which was technically true) all of these media outlets managed to misinform their readers themselves.

FB's own guidelines allow satire - but they pretended that the caption below was non-existent.

What does this mean - what is the big picture?

The biggest problem in media outlets approach to the battle going on in social media, is to classify things as "fake news" and, by implication, mark other content as legitimate.

This does not take into account the nature of social media warfare - false flags or events which are meant to be attributed to the wrong side are very common in social media. Baits to the opposite side are also common. They are much, much more common in the virtual world than they are in real life.

It is very common for Hindutva supporters to pose as Muslims to post provocative messages; similarly for Dravidian fascists to pose as Brahmins. You can see screenshots where a person conveniently named "Subramanian Iyengar" would post some nasty thing about Tamil or other castes (in Tamil Brahmin dialect to boot).

Surely scroll or FB or NYT knew this - they could not have failed to see the caption. This was neither fake news nor legitimate news. It was simply a clever bait in the new realm of social media - and they all treated it completely without context as if it was "information".

I do not know what this says about all these media giants. The person who authored the image must have been laughing his ass off at them.

The Nobel Peace Prize

 I first read about Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa in a book ("This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality") by a Russian dissident named Peter Pomerantsev.

I read this book to figure out more about disinformation fighters in the rest of the world - but I quickly realized, at that time, that what Pomerantsev and Ressa faced was different from what I viewed as disinformation.

By that time, in 2019, I had already worked on identifying disinformation in a few projects - The United States of South India article in Newsminute being one of them.

My views have hardened in the past two years - the West (and therefore, the Nobel Peace committee) see Putin as some kind of monster spinning his web of deceit to get Trump elected or to get Brexit done.

Their view of mis/disinformation is a very selfish one. This was revealed in the COVID era - the mainstream western press repeatedly upheld their own vaccines; and highlighted failures and attributed motives to the Russian and Chinese vaccine efforts. It is likely that it was this effort that caused the high vaccine hesitancy in Russia.

Faced with Trump's election, American liberals have conjured an implausible global war against authoritarianism, to which they have added countries and leaders not based on reality, but on the very disinformation that they are supposedly against.

The very idea that a failure against COVID implies a leader's incompetence is wrong, I believe. This flat view ignores the many stages of development countries face, historical context and local administrative differences. However, this very flawed idea was pushed on the world by the American press, and eagerly exploited by partisans throughout the world, including from India.

How is this not disinformation?

I am now skeptical of the occasional villains conveniently thrown up the West - now Putin, then Duterte, then Bolsanoro; earlier Viktor Orban. May be these are bad people, but the Western press's coverage of India has convinced me not to trust what they choose to focus on.

They are now saying that Dmitry Muratov, who also won the Peace prize today supported the Russian proxy war on Ukraine.

I am sure these two peace prize winners are brave, but we should not give our trust over to the Nobel committee at all (remember their award to Obama when he had just become President?).