State need not run fact-checking units

Given the number of proposals for fact-checking units in flight, it wouldn’t be misplaced to call 2023 the year of the executive-run fact-checking units. The ministry of electronics and information technology [MeitY] (April), Karnataka (August), and Tamil Nadu (November) announced setting them up. And, we may see more as states such as Uttarakhand have stated their intention to do so. The Union minister for home affairs has also reportedly advised senior police officers to set up fact-checking units in their departments.

- Prateek Waghre

Faced with complex challenges in a polluted information ecosystem seemingly overrun with false information, propaganda, hate speech and other kinds of problematic speech, there are indeed calls for governments to intervene.

Set aside for a moment that these calls can be motivated, at least in the near term, depending on alignment with who is currently in government. Thus, the executive branch of the government, whether at the Union or state level, feels compelled to do “something” invoking the age-old ‘politicians fallacy’.

There are several reasons why executive-run fact-checking units are flawed. For now, let’s consider two buckets — their institutional design, and the reliance on misplacing the locus of the problem resulting in driving a government intervention at the wrong layer of the, undoubtedly, complicated set of problems.

First, with regard to design, all flavours of fact-checking units we have seen proposed this year envision some form of information control. MeitY’s guidelines are drafted such that intermediaries (social media platforms, internet services providers, cloud services providers, and so on) can be expected to remove information about the government that a government-designated unit deems to be “fake” or “false”. It is currently under challenge in the Bombay high court with a verdict expected in December.