Twitter is in the news this week in India for putting a “manipulated media” tag on posts by leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party, containing propaganda that fact-checkers found to include misinformation. While the Indian government has turned this into a fight for narrative against the social media network, the development is also a powerful reminder that misinformation – and efforts to address it – will be closely watched.
Sumitra Badrinathan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, who received a PhD in political science this year from the University of Pennsylvania. Badrinathan’s work focuses on misinformation and comparative politics, with a focus on India.
In a recent paper based on an experiment in Bihar during the 2019 elections, for example, Badrinathan found that even an hour-long module aimed at improving people’s ability to identify fake news did not necessarily make them any better at it. Even more…