Interview: Sumitra Badrinathan on tackling fake news and the effects of BJP’s ‘supply advantage’

Twitter is in the news this week in India for putting a “manipulated media” tag on posts by leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party, containing propaganda that fact-checkers found to include misinformation. While the Indian government has turned this into a fight for narrative against the social media network, the development is also a powerful reminder that misinformation – and efforts to address it – will be closely watched.

Sumitra Badrinathan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, who received a PhD in political science this year from the University of Pennsylvania. Badrinathan’s work focuses on misinformation and comparative politics, with a focus on India.

In a recent paper based on an experiment in Bihar during the 2019 elections, for example, Badrinathan found that even an hour-long module aimed at improving people’s ability to identify fake news did not necessarily make them any better at it. Even more significantly, the results found that those who identified as supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party seemed to become worse at identifying fake news after the training module – potentially because of a ‘backfire effect’ in which people tend to hold firmer to their beliefs after being corrected.

I spoke to Badrinathan about…

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