How Fake News and Misinformation Work in India
India was ranked by the World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Risk Report as the country with the highest risk of misinformation and disinformation globally. This assessment reflects a combination of structural conditions that make India exceptionally vulnerable: 800+ million internet users with highly variable media literacy; a dominant role for encrypted WhatsApp groups in information circulation; extreme linguistic diversity (22 scheduled languages + hundreds of dialects) that makes systematic fact-checking structurally difficult; a political environment that incentivises the creation and distribution of false information; and a history of misinformation-related communal violence in which false rumours (about cow slaughter, child kidnapping, minority community violence) have directly triggered mob attacks and deaths.
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| Representational Image: How Fake News and Misinformation Work in India |
The organised groups manage over five million WhatsApp groups for political
communication (documented in East Asia Forum, 2024); fake WhatsApp forwards
about conspiracies, threats, opposition misconduct, and
government achievements circulate widely in shared groups with no source
attribution. In the 2019 elections and the 2024 elections, WhatsApp-based
political disinformation was documented as influencing voter perceptions in
multiple states.
What You Need to Know
- India
ranked highest for misinformation and disinformation risk among all
countries in WEF's 2024 Global Risk Report.
- WhatsApp India: 535 million users; primary daily communication platform; encrypted messages not visible to Meta; forwarding restrictions introduced 2019 (messages can only be forwarded to 5 chats, down from 20) but do not prevent resharing with modified text.
- Deepfakes in elections: documented use of AI-generated deepfake videos of political leaders in 2023–24 state elections; Sage Journals research (November 2025) documented that the 2024 election was "marred by an unprecedented wave of disinformation — deepfakes, doctored visuals, and communal hoaxes — disseminated across multilingual, mobile-first platforms."
How It Works in Practice
1. The viral rumour lifecycle: Indian misinformation
typically begins with a provocative claim on a small community — either on
Twitter, Telegram, or a local YouTube channel — and is amplified into WhatsApp
groups by motivated individuals. The WhatsApp group structure ensures that the
same message reaches thousands of groups simultaneously, each time appearing as
a forwarded message from a trusted contact. The claim is amplified beyond
fact-checking capacity before any verification occurs; fact-checks published
later reach far fewer people than the original false claim.
2. Communal misinformation as political weapon: The
most consequential category of Indian misinformation is communal — false claims
about Hindu-Muslim violence, cow slaughter, "love jihad," terrorist
infiltration, and similar themes that have directly triggered mob violence.
Media researchers have documented correlations between viral WhatsApp messages
and subsequent communal violence in Jharkhand, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.
This category is both the most dangerous and the most politically motivated —
organisations with political interests in communal polarisation actively
produce this content.
3. The government information monopoly in conflict:
During Operation Sindoor (May 2025) and the 2020 Galwan Valley clash with
China, the government imposed severe information restrictions; the absence of
independent verification allowed both propaganda and opposition
counter-narratives to circulate without fact-checking constraint. Media access
restrictions — blanket internet shutdowns in conflict areas — create information vacuums that misinformation
fills.
4. Platform responsibility and its limits: Meta
(WhatsApp and Facebook), Google (YouTube), and Twitter/X are required under IT
Rules 2021 to respond to government takedown requests; they also independently
moderate some high-virality misinformation. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption
means the company cannot read message content; its interventions are limited to
removing accounts and limiting forwarding. Google's YouTube fact-check labels
and Meta's information panels exist but are language-limited and reach users
only after content has already spread.
5. The fact-checking ecosystem: AltNews, Boom Live,
AFWA (India Today's fact-check unit), Vishvas News, and The Quint's WebQoof are
India's primary fact-checking outlets; they collectively cannot keep pace with
the volume of misinformation but provide documented debunks that informed citizens
can reference. The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) certifies Indian
fact-checkers; but the certified outlets reach a small fraction of India's
information consumers.
What People Often Misunderstand
- Both
pro-government and anti-government misinformation circulate in India:
Misinformation about election fraud (both by government supporters
claiming results are rigged against them and by opposition claiming EVM
manipulation), fake video of atrocities, and false political biographies
circulate across the political spectrum; the scale and organisation of
pro-government misinformation infrastructure (BJP's five million WhatsApp
groups) does not mean anti-government misinformation is absent.
- WhatsApp
forwarding restrictions did not solve the misinformation problem:
Meta's 2019 restriction limiting forwards to five chats reduced virality
of specific high-forward chains; motivated actors adapted by copying and
reposting rather than forwarding, circumventing the technical restriction;
the pattern of spread changed form without substantively reducing
misinformation volume.
- AltNews's
founder's arrest was not about AltNews's journalism: Mohammed Zubair
was arrested over a 2018 tweet, not an AltNews investigation; the multiple
FIRs filed across different states ("venue shopping") used minor
pretexts; the arrest's purpose was deterrence, not prosecution for
specific journalistic wrongdoing.
- Media literacy alone cannot solve the misinformation problem: Policy recommendations often emphasise media literacy education; while valuable, media literacy cannot address politically motivated misinformation production by organised actors with state-level resources; structural interventions in platform design, regulatory frameworks, and political culture are needed alongside education.
- What Changes Over Time
India's AI regulation framework — under development as of 2025–26 — will need to address political deepfakes if it is to meaningfully protect democratic information; current AI governance drafts address data privacy more than electoral integrity.
The ECI's deepfake monitoring initiative
— partnering with tech companies for content flagging during elections —
represents the first systematic government response to AI-generated election
misinformation, though its effectiveness remains to be assessed.
Sources and Further Reading
- East
Asia Forum — Social media and Indian elections 2024: https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/05/17/are-social-media-ai-and-misinformation-undermining-indian-democracy/
- Sage
Journals — Retroactive gatekeepers India 2024: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27523543251395190
- Wikipedia
— Freedom of the press in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_India
- Kashmir Media Service — Operation Sindoor crackdown: https://kmsnews.org/kms/2026/05/07/indias-unprecedented-crackdown-on-media-freedom-during-indo-pak-standoff-2025.html
- RSF — India: https://rsf.org/en/country/india