The rise of fake news poses a bigger challenge of how to deal with those seeking to destabilise the state or push their perspectives to the front. This report discusses the ways fake news can manifest, how its spread is enabled through social media and search engines, how people's cognitive predispositions work towards imbibing it, the international responses to it. The report also looks into the challenges of combating fake news. A good public-private partnership is necessary in order to expose fake news and ensure better cooperative efforts in countering it.
Highlights:
- An approach to fake news must be grounded in an understanding of how technology enables fake news to spread, including research on human disposition to believing fake news.
- It would be helpful to make distinctions between the different categories of falsehoods that are being spread. A conflation of all falsehoods under fake news leads to the risk of ineffective approaches towards tackling it.
- Efforts to counter fake news should be done along with ongoing programmes (critical thinking and media literacy, etc.) at building social resilience and national consensus. Framing the truth is a necessary exercise in a post-truth world.
- Collaborating with alternative news media outlets and social media platforms like Facebook which are seen as "authentic."
- There needs to be more concentrated efforts at good public-private partnerships in order to provide expeditious counter-narratives that challenge fake news.