See some below articles about misinformation/disinformation news,
gurugram police briefs on nuh violence appeals dont believe in any rumours and fake news
‘Fake message’ being circulated in name of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud
Manipur violence: How fake news and rumours are adding fuel to the fire
I don’t need to tell anything new about fake news, its disastrous impact and a tearing apart helpless system against it. We know all that, the question is, How to stop it? lets be real, it cant be stopped completely, but we can give resistivity fight if we can trace the origin or the parts involved in the chain, we may tackle this menace up to some level. And that’s my idea and sharing the same here.
Lets understand with example.
miscreant A has manufactured some video/images and want to create a trouble by circulating them. So, he will upload/share it with fake or real identity to the targeted whatsapp group/Instagram/X etc and from hereon it spreads via similar interest groups and making it difficult to contain or find out the source.
What if Whatsapp/X/Instagram, whenever anyone uploads any video/image, append the user’s data to the video/image as a metadata. For example,
miscreant A shares video to whatsapp group (first time upload) via mobile app, just append his/her user data like phone IMEI, IP address, location, user details etc to the video/image itself. Now,as this video/image is being forwarded further for circulation, keep appending all those user’s data who forwards it to others. This will make a list of users who forwarded particular images/video to others within the image/video itself. I know you have questions,
- How can whatsapp do that? Answer is, Image processing is not new, Image/video shall be bit-mapped to include metadata and still keeping image/video quality intact. Which Image format to use i.e gif, jpg etc, are questions of implementation but not difficult to do that.
- So, next question is, There are thousands of users uploading/sharing millions of such images/videos, wont it be expensive for apps to do such heavy operations? Answer is, yes, But metadata processing and appending operation happens at user device so it is not going to put any burden on App server or network. Rather it is going to increase image/video size as it circulates more which can make forwarding sometime cumbersome.
- Then you would say, how would Social media apps know the location, Then answer is, remember you gave them your location sharing permissions!
- Is this feature always on? Ideally yes,
Alright, so next action would be once such forwards reaches to law enforcement agency, they shall ask whatsapp/X/Instagram to decode all users metadata associated with such images/videos and take the actions.
1st action would be, Telco could stop their internet as they know IMEI number, block them for some period as enforcement agency asks, 2nd would be, Stop Whatsapp/X/Instagram access for some time and 3rd would be, once identified, take them to the justice. Such metadata should work as a Evidence in the court of law.
Next question would be, what if miscreant A is outside of law agency’s jurisdiction like in foreign country?, So answer is, They may remain out of local law’s net but Inter-governments agreement nowadays propose a ways to handle them, moreover, there will be hardly a chance where all elements of the chain would be out of jurisdiction, some of them or any are inside the territory would face the actions.
I would name this feature “Lawful tracing” and all social media should have it implemented. Also, note that my this proposed idea limited to image/videos and not for text based forwards. The silent benefit is also that users wont be blindly forwarding each and everything the receive fearing someone is monitoring it.
One more idea here can be “Social media score” for users. Social media platform based on this feature or many similar feature can use to rate its users. Higher the score, higher credible the user’s post and shareable.
I will end this blog here, What do you think about this idea? Do share your views.
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