According to a senior official, Google's Jigsaw subsidiary is starting a new anti-misinformation project in India to stop misleading infoinformation that has been blamed for inciting violence.
The campaign will make use of "prebunking" videos shared on the company's YouTube channel and other social media platforms, which are intended to refute false claims before they gain traction.
In contrast to rival Twitter, which is reducing its trust and safety teams despite Twitter's new owner Elon Musk's promises that it won't turn into a "free-for-all hellscape," Google is making an attempt to combat the spread of disinformation.
Throughout the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Google recently tested a strategy in Europe to counter anti-refugee online narratives.
The experiment in India will have a wider reach because it will deal with several regional native languages, Hindi, and Marathi—and various regions of a nation with over a billion population.
According to Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw's head of research and development, “This presented an opportunity to research prebunking in a non-western, global south market,”
Similar to other nations, India experiences quick dissemination of false information, primarily via social media, which increases tensions on the political and religious fronts.
Officials from the Indian government have urged tech giants like Google, Meta, and Twitter to do more to stop the dissemination of false information.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) has repeatedly used "extraordinary powers" to block Twitter and Facebook accounts, YouTube channels, and other allegedly harmful misinformation-spreading accounts.
Whatsapp, the messaging application from Meta, which has more than 200 million users in India, has also been used to send inflammatory messages. Following widespread beatings of more than a dozen people, some of whom died, caused by false claims of child abductors in 2018, the firm limited the number of times a message could be sent.
Jigsaw has created five movies in three languages in collaboration with the Alfred Landecker Foundation, a German pro-democracy organisation, the charitable investment company Omidya Network India, and a variety of smaller regional partners.