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India’s election overshadowed by the rise of online misinformation


India has kicked off the world's biggest election on Friday, bug the electoral landscape grapples with the fear of growing misinformation.

Pratik Sinha, the co-founder of the Indian non-profit fact-checking website Alt News, says there’s been an increase in the deliberate creation of misinformation to polarize society. Hamsini Hariharan, a subject matter expert at the U.K.-based fact-checking startup Logically, told TechCrunch about the trend of “cheapfakes” — content generated with less sophisticated measures of altering images, videos, and audio — being widely shared across social media platforms in India. However, a Meta spokesperson noted the existence of a WhatsApp tip line, which was launched in late March, and an awareness campaign on Instagram to identify and stop misinformation using the platform’s built-in features.

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