Fake News –Politics, War, Youth and Pandemic

The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events. Any material
borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will
bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or
misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.

Samrat Ganguly, EMBA 2020-23, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur

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The phrase Fake news is generally used to denote a deliberate disinformation spreading
content which one can easily encounter in any social media platforms like Whatsapp,
Twitter or Facebook. Though this term got prominence in January 11, 2017 when then US
President-elect Mr. Donald Trump used it to label CNN a “fake news” channel but we will be
surprised to know that this term has a long and quite an illustrious history. A quick look in
the Google Books Ngrams Viewer, which tracks the popularity and usage of a word or
phrase for last 200 years, we can very well see that this term has been in popular uses since
1820s and had seen its popularity during the period between 1920s and 1940s before
reaching its ultimate fames during 2000s. It was chosen as the word of the year 2017 by
Glasgow based Collin dictionary

War & Politics

If major world events are plotted on the timeline axis of the above Google Ngrams Viewer
graph, the peaks seem to coincides with the Wars that the major English speaking nations
got into – Word War I and Word War II. Fake news has been always been used as a potent
tool to influence allies to get into war and run covert propaganda.
Be it fake Hitlers’ secret map of South America and part of Central America, planted by
British MI6 agents to influence President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to jump into WWII or be
US’s use of fabricated/misrepresented mass intelligence report alleging Saddam Hussein
having Weapons of Mass destructions (WBDs), to get British PM Tony Blair onboard in the
Iraq War. Fake news has been the favorite tool for politicians to execute the war games
through the last century.
Youth & Pandemic
In present time, thanks to a smart phones the scale of reach and the ability to make impact
by a Fake News has increased exponentially. And youth have a natural affinity towards these
gadgets which acts as an excellent vector this social virus. With steady increase in the Youth
population in the Democratic countries, where internet content moderation is low to
moderate - Fake News tends to propagate faster. This has resulted into rise of mass
polarization over religious and political matter.
In the current COVID-19 time, where nation is one hand battling the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the
other hand the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus related fake news has resulted into rise
of antiscience trend all over. Resulting into increase in the Pandemic’s potency.
In conclusion Fake news starts a harmless new content then steadily rises to become a
wildfire. Men in power uses Fake news to mold public opinion to meet their political needs.
Youth if can come out from lazy thinking tendency, then this menace can be tamed.