When Fake News Creates Impressions That Stick, Despite Debunking

Here’s why it is important to fact-check what you read.

Falling prey to fake news seems to be happening with increasing regularity, such that frequent clarifications and corrigendums are issued to correct misinformation for readers. But sadly, the efforts at damage control often don’t get the kind of traction the original clickbait-y stories do.

Author Anuja Chauhan seems to have been struck with one such piece of misinformation while speaking to the Economic Times recently, when she was asked about writer Chetan Bhagat’s “attempts at feminism”.

Relying on the falsely attributed Facebook post that went viral last month, she said:

His ‘feminism’ attempts are a total disaster. That ‘let her take her time’ post in particular made me and my friends want to bang our heads against a wall. It’s terrible.

Let’s rewind to April 2017, when a parody Facebook account posing as a legit Chetan Bhagat fan page with over 180,000 followers delivered a benevolently sexist monologue titled ‘Let her take her time’.

A part of the post reads:

When she takes time to dress up to go out with you, let her. She has given her time to make sure that your ironed clothes are in their place and knows better than you, where your socks are.

Soon enough, a storm was unleashed upon the author with people slamming and calling him a “misogynistic, entitled piece of sh*t” and even penned an alternate version – “Let him say stupid, sexist things...let him”.

Bhagat then brought the “fake post” to the notice of the enraged social media beings as well as media outlets', who unleashed their wrath upon him.

I hope media outlets attributing me to fake posts have decency to apologise before readers and admit how they were lazy, dumb and unfair.

— Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) May 3, 2017

The episode was followed by reports by Blush and Newslaundry slamming the “media race for clickbait”.

Recently, several reports doing the rounds on social media said that Rs 121 crore of the earnings of Baahubali 2 was being donated to the families of 25 CRPF personnel killed by Naxals in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district on 24 April. The news turned out to be fake.

In another incident, India had a fake report from an unverified website going viral, which claimed the Congress to be the “fourth most corrupt political party in the world.”

Published by BBC News Point, many mistook it for the real BBC, but it was quickly debunked as fake.