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.