Facebook has a massive disinformation problem in India. This student learned firsthand how damaging it can be

Pankaj Mishra was in the midst of a weeks-long protest against a fee hike at his New Delhi university in November 2019 when he received a perplexing call from one of India's independent news outlets dedicated to debunking disinformation online. 

The fact-checking reporter on the line told Mishra his photo was circulating on social media with a fake profile identifying him as Moinuddin, a 47-year old Muslim student from Kerala who had been studying at the university since 1989 — the year Mishra was born. 

The post disparaged the graduate student, implying that he was a fake "revolutionary" who was there for cheap lodgings and free food, wasting taxpayers' money. Mishra, who's not from Kerala but India's Uttar Pradesh state, was 30 at the time and pursuing a master's degree in philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University. 

"They were spreading the news deliberately because they wanted to defame our [fee protest] movement," he alleged. 

Mishra said he thinks it was an attempt to inflame religious tensions and smear the protesters. 

It's an increasingly common occurrence in India, where the use of smartphones has exploded over the past five years. Along with that technological trend came a dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and, more particularly, its messaging service WhatsApp, which is encrypted and therefore hard to monitor. 

That's led to a vast amount of disinformation pushed on the platforms just as serious concerns are being raised about Facebook's ability to curb the spread of hate speech and inflammatory language on its site in India, home to the largest number of Facebook users in the world, at more than 300 million.

Policing disinformation, hate speech and inflammatory content is a world-wide problem for the social media network. But the issue is amplified in India, where, experts say, disinformation is often fuelled by political entities and is highly organized. This, when combined with India's lack of widespread digital literacy and the 20 different local languages used on Facebook, makes disinformation run rampant and fact-checking extremely challenging. 

In Mishra's case, he wasn't the subject of physical violence, but the flood of fake posts plunged him into a depression for months.

"It was traumatic, it was depressive, and I hope that nobody could face such a situation again," he said. "I was seriously distressed." 

So was his family. As the false information spread like wildfire on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, his mother, who lives 700 kilometres away from her son in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, wouldn't stop crying and telephoning to see if he was safe.

His wife was forced to field calls and messages from dozens of people, some who berated her. 

Mishra's friends took turns escorting him to his classes, in packs, to make sure he was safe from attack, and his social media accounts were inundated with abusive messages. 

"It took nearly six months to get out of that distress," he told CBC News. Two years later, the stigma still follows him. People jokingly introduce him as Moinuddin.