That YouTube video you liked might be fake news

NEW DELHI: Some videos on YouTube claim French President Emmanuel Macron greeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi by touching his feet last June in Paris. It is a false claim but just one of these videos has been seen more than 12 lakh times. “France ke president neModi ke pair chhoo kar liya aashirwad, Modi ji ne utha kar gale laga liya (Macron touches Modi’s feet for blessings; Modi embraces him),” says the video title.

If the Modi-Macron claim was plain mischief, other claims are nefarious. This month, Karen Rebelo, factchecker and reporter at news website BoomLive, found that two unrelated videos — one from Bangladesh and another from Rajasthan — were shared together and presented as scenes of communal unrest in the western Indian state as a result of a temple being attacked.

These were shared across social media platforms in India, including YouTube. Some internet-sleuthing revealed that the two videos were unrelated. An Indian news channel also independently confirmed the same from Ranipur in Rajasthan, where the violence was alleged to have taken place.

While Facebook and Twitter usually get blamed for spreading ‘fake news’, plenty of unreliable videos are circulating on YouTube as well. The company is trying to tackle the problem with new rules on labelling and monetisation of videos, but an expert said policing content is not easy in India because of multiple languages.

When student activist Gurmehar Kaur’s stand against war and student organisation ABVP went viral last year, opponents tried to tar her image with a video of another woman dancing inside a car. Today, most YouTube search results for “Gurmehar Kaur dancing” are videos debunking the claim, but one titled “Gurmehar Kaur’s dance video with friends!” remains available and has been seen over 97,000 times since last March. Copies of the video had then spread on Twitter and Facebook too.

“It is easy to download a video from YouTube and share it elsewhere. What goes viral on one platform, goes viral on others as well,” said Pratik Sinha, founder of Alt News, a fake news-watch website, adding YouTube should work with other organisations to check facts and take down malicious videos. Rebelo said fact-checking would be easier if YouTube published ‘metadata’ for videos, such as the camera used, location etc. “We use the same techniques for video as we do for images, and we are struggling.”

YouTube has tightened the screws on rogue channels. Earlier, a channel with 10,000 total views could start earning money from ads, but since January this year they must have “1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months” to be eligible. In February, You-Tube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced they would have 10,000 human reviewers by the year-end to vet videos flagged by users. Wojcicki has also spoken about plans to link videos containing conspiracy theories to related Wikipedia articles.

Sinha doubts the effectiveness of Wikipedia cues as the crowdsourced encyclopedia is vulnerable to unscrupulous edits. “It’s a small step. I can’t say how it is going to help,” said Sinha, pointing out that the Alt News Wikipedia page is frequently vandalised. As for human reviewers, founder of social media hoax-busting website smhoaxslayer.com Pankaj Jain said it is high time more came on board. “YouTube depends a lot on algorithms. Human intervention is much needed.”

YouTube has 22.5 crore monthly active users on mobile in India, many of whom rely heavily on video as data plans are cheap. “If you take the local train, you will see nearly everyone is immersed in a video on their phone. The dynamics for YouTube have changed with cheap data,” says Jain. “The new users don’t know how to filter what is fake,” said Rebelo, adding that the current crop of factcheckers are largely focused on English and Hindi videos. YouTube’s head of entertainment in India, Satya Raghavan, said starting 2016 Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam videos became popular, followed by Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati. “2017 is what I call the return of Hindi because by that time internet penetration was (high) in the smallest of towns in north India.”

In the US, questions have also been raised about YouTube’s own video recommendation system. Ex-Googler Guillaume Chaslot wrote in a blog that its algorithm recommended polarising content to viewers looking for US electionrelated videos in the run-up to the polls. In a recent New York Times editorial, researcher Zeynep Tufekci called YouTube “one of the most powerful radicalising instruments of the 21st century.”

Raghavan, however, said the algorithm is just a tailoring tool. A new viewer from, say, Chennai would see a lot more content in Tamil. “Once you start to watch content, the algorithm takes over. That then says, ‘you liked watching A, B, C, D, so I’ll give you more of that.’”

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/that-youtube-video-you-liked-might-be-fake-news/articleshow/63390381.cms