Eastern Mirror Desk
Dimapur, April 27: Fake news and unverified information have become an epidemic as the use of social media increases. Fake news affect governments, communities and citizens because of unverified information that often fuel fear, and encourage fear mongering besides rumours. Extreme instances often lead to violence and riots.
Social media allows people to disseminate misinformation and disinformation freely. This was pointed out by senior journalist Kallol Dey at the Google News Initiative's "fact checking training to combat tide of disinformation and fake news in India."
The programme was conducted for Dimapur-based media personnel and journalists, on Sat. April 27 at Hotel Saramati in Dimapur.
The training was hosted by the Dimapur Press Club with Kallol Dey as the trainer. He is part of the Google News Initiative training network, and one of the 240 selected journalists and journalism educators of the GNI India Training Network trained by Google in 2018.
"Fake news affects people and is a continuing and challenging problem and as a journalist we have an important role at the end of the day to debunk the fake news but we have failed to do so while failing to make use of technology to our advantage," Dey said.
For journalists, he said, there is no excuse for being disconnected with the rest of the country as they are more empowered with technology. People may not believe journalists but at the end of the day they believe what journalists produce, the media personnel were told.
Dey asserted that "the moment we endorse fake news we bring damage and it was our duty to give right information to people for them to take the right decision."
The trainer clarified that misinformation was false information but the person who disseminates the information believes it to be true. Disinformation on the other hand is false information and the person who is disseminating it knows it is false; it is a deliberate intention to lie, the trainer said.
