-The Hindu Blames ‘fake’ online messages for the panic The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the 21-day national lockdown was “inevitable” in the face of an “unprecedented global crisis” like COVID-19. The government blamed “fake and misleading” messages on social media about COVID-19 for creating widespread panic, which led to mass “barefoot” journey of migrant workers from cities to their native villages. Please click here to...

-Livemint.com Fake News linking the spread of Covid-19 to chickens have cost the Indian poultry market over ₹1.6 billion a day. The world’s fourth biggest chicken producer now faces its worst crisis in a decade In the first week of February, Somnath Shelke, a poultry farmer in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar, started receiving text messages on WhatsApp that baffled him. “Broiler chicken me korona virus ko paya gaya hai," one of them said. “Tamam logo...

-The Indian Express All comparisons between COVID-19 and TB end with the superficial observation that they are both deadly respiratory tract infections. The world has been spooked by COVID-19, the novel flu-like virus which emerged from the slaughter-houses of China and is now sweeping across the planet, propelled by the very engine of the global economy that it now threatens to pull asunder. Thanks to the waves of news engulfing us, including...

-TheWire.in A new study from LSE, funded by a grant from WhatsApp, shines a spotlight on Hindu males and disinformation against minority groups. New Delhi: New research suggests that the spread of Fake News in India that sparks mob lynchings is largely done out of “reasons of prejudice and ideology”, rather than “ignorance or digital literacy”. “It can be seen…that assuming most misinformation spreads through rural and/or illiterate users and targeting functional digital...

-Press release of 4th All India Media Conference, dated 8 October, 2019 Udaipur, Oct. 8: More than 300 media practitioners, researchers, scholars and educationists from different states of India and from four foreign countries took a pledge to empower the underprivileged sections of society by ending the digital divide and create new opportunities to highlight the issues of common people, rural areas, landless labourers, malnourished children and farmers affected by climate...