Thread by @tanishka_s2

2021 was a year dominated by news about farmers protests, vaccines, covid, elections, Afghanistan.

It was also a year flooded with misinformation on the same. I spoke to fact checkers in India about trends in fake news & how they tackled them.@newslaundry newslaundry.com/2021/12/28/mis…

Data compiled by @boomlive_in showed that out of the 794 fact checks they carried, 422 were related to political claims, 160 were communal in nature, & 59 were related to health and Covid. The majority of the fake news was shared as videos, followed by as photos, and text pieces.

Fact checkers noted that fake news targeting minorities was a major trend this year. @AltNews 's @free_thinker said that the way minorities are targeted using misinformation in the most organised manner in India was unprecedented.

Interesting insights on how medical misinformation is tackled. @QuintFactCheck 's @Abhilash279 explained why Telegram, specifically, was a hotbed for anti-vaccine misinformation, and why stuff that is not viral is often not fact checked.

Fact checking on a daily basis can, and does, take a toll. @jencyjac told me how "There is always a feeling of impending doom," and that there is a lack of government and institutional will to design programmes related to media literacy.

Also insights on how misinformation is harder to debunk when it is shared by political accounts. @FactCheckIndia 's @Nidhi_Jacob0 noted how when information floods in and people do not know what to believe, they end up reinforcing their own biases.

Read the full report on @newslaundry. And please support fact checking websites such as these, that work very hard to debunk misinformation and bring us the truth. 🙂

newslaundry.com/2021/12/28/mis…