A news article wrapped as an extensive social media analysis by BBC says, “A rising tide of nationalism in India is driving ordinary citizens to spread fake news, according to BBC research.”

The BBC article further suggests that the right-wing networks are much more organised in spreading the fake nationalistic stories than the left-wing. The research claims that there is an overlap of these fake news networks and support system of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The research methodology used by BBC as outlined in the article is based on ‘qualitative research techniques.’ To come to the above conclusion, BBC researchers met 80 participants across 3 countries, analysed 16,000 Twitter accounts and 3,000 Facebook pages. However, BBC has not divulged how and why they came up with these 3 countries, how they chose this particular sample size of Twitter accounts and Facebook pages (which is not the true representative of the entire population), who conducted this qualitative research and their own biases regarding data and its evaluation, along with many other flaws which appear in the methodology as of now. Thus, the research appears to be very vague and subjective.

The True Picture brings to readers a comprehensive list of widely shared fake news which has been busted by us and other fact checker portal like OpIndia, on the basis of factual analysis and objective assessment.

Let us analyse if it is ‘Nationalistic’ or ‘Anti-national forces’ that spread the fake news.