​​Fake News, Conspiracies & Selfies
Maxim India|May 2018

Maxim goes behind-the-scenes to understand #FakeNews.

Sujit Bhar ​​​​​​​
​​Fake News, Conspiracies & Selfies

Nobody wants fake news. News itself is so erogenous these days, faking it would make it sound like porn, or something thereabouts. But quite like porn, fake news is produced, in the millions of bits and bytes and column centimetres, and is then disseminated over social media before it permeates back into mainline journalism where it is consumed voraciously as fake breakfasts, fake lunches and even fake dinners.

Understandably, the government of the day has reacted, but that is another story, a rather true one, quite beyond the ambit of this particular article.

The big observation of social scientists has been that fake news is here to stay. Those were times where lies spread through tortuous routes of rumours, coffee shops, snail-mails and even ancient emails. Then the process of development took over and the speed increased. Today, if you are two inches taller, a shade fairer and you have bigger biceps in your Facebook account than you can really measure at home, you better recalibrate your measuring tape. Quite like what that Latin smart guy René Descartes had predicted so long ago, “You think, therefore you are.” Descartes was way ahead of his time. How he managed to read into MySpace and Facebook’s status data is also beyond the palette for this canvas.

Technically, though, what is fake? According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, it is: “False stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.”

As usual, the dictionary got it all wrong. Fake news is real, fake news is the flavour of the day, fake news is the bedrock on which modern societies—from the US to India—are being built. Fake news was, is and forever will be. How dare some bleary-eyed, pale academics in semi-dark rooms define it as something wrong?

This story is from the May 2018 edition of Maxim India.

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This story is from the May 2018 edition of Maxim India.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

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