The truth-vigilantes fighting India’s fake news
It’s ‘our way of helping society’, say two men in Bangalore whose mission is to bust false messages circulating on WhatsApp
Seeing Shammas Oliyath work at 10pm, as he does almost every night, one is reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. Except Oliyath has a calm personality, a benign smile and works on a computer.
He is targeting a barrage of forwarded messages on WhatsApp, trying to separate the true ones from the fake. And it is not child’s play.
Oliyath, along with his business partner Balkrishna Birla, founded check4spam.com in 2015. Their main task is to bust fake messages floating around on WhatsApp.
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Why? “That is our way of helping society,” says Birla. Both have day jobs in large software companies in India’s tech capital of Bangalore. Their avocation is undertaken in the dead of night after a gruelling day of work and after household chores are done.
Their choice of medium is not incidental. WhatsApp has more than 1.2 billion users globally, and more than 200 million are in India. And users continue to grow along with the number of mobile internet users in the country, now estimated at more than 346 million.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, WhatsApp doesn’t require users to set up an account – only a smartphone is required. And, most importantly, WhatsApp messages are not public. They are, at most, limited to a group of people. This personal touch makes it a more impenetrable echo chamber, as there is often no one to counter argue – no one to point to an alternate source of news.