Too Quick To Forward: How Misinformation Travels In India

Recently, a 41-second video of an eviction drive went viral in India with the claim that it showed Muslim homes being demolished after a new government came to power in West Bengal. The clip appeared to show people crying and structures being pulled down. To many viewers, it looked familiar enough: checked lungis, skull-caps, Bangla writing on the walls, the visual grammar of poverty and panic. Only, the video was not from West Bengal. Fact-checkers later traced the clip to Mirpur in Dhaka.

A clip from Bangladesh had been lifted, renamed and placed inside the politics of Bengal. The location was wrong. The political claim was false. The video had clearly been used with intent. The suffering, however, was real.

That is what made the clip both dangerous and political. It was not a cheap fake made in some dark corner of the internet. It did not need artificial intelligence or sophisticated editing. It needed only a caption. A family’s distress became evidence for a completely different story. The grief of real people was reassigned.

This is the new cruelty of misinformation. It does not always manufacture suffering. Often, it steals suffering and gives it a false address.

While researching my book, Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent and True, I often found that the most frightening claims were not the obviously fake ones. They were the ones that carried a real wound inside a false frame. A demolition has happened somewhere. A woman has been assaulted somewhere. A crowd has gathered somewhere. A body has fallen somewhere. The camera has recorded it. Then the caption arrives, and fact begins to turn false.

We still use the term “fake news” too casually, as if the problem is only that people believe things that are not true. But in many of the most disturbing cases, the damage is subtler. The image may be real. The video may be real. The pain may be real. What is false is the storyline, the context, and the intent.

That is mal-information at its most dangerous. It does not merely lie. It plugs reality into a lie.

The Dhaka demolition video is a perfect example of this moral theft. The clip worked because it was emotionally legible. You did not need to know the exact geography. You did not need to know the law. You saw rubble, heard cries, and felt something. Before the mind could ask, “Where is this from?” the caption had already answered: Bengal. Bangladeshis. Bulldozer. Encroachment. Action.

In that instant, suffering became political raw material.

This is how misinformation travels in India today. It often arrives not as information, but as emotion. It does not ask us to think first. It asks us to feel first. Fear, anger, disgust, revenge, humiliation, triumph—these become the engines that move a forward faster than a fact-check ever can. And because the video looked real, many people did not pause. Why would they? It fitted a pre-existing political imagination. It confirmed what some wanted to believe: that a certain kind of person was finally being punished, that the state was finally acting, that illegality had finally met force.

The truth was slower. It usually is.

By the time the fact-check arrived, the clip had already done its work. It had travelled. It had hardened attitudes. It had given viewers the thrill of watching someone else being punished. The people in the video had become extras in a political drama they did not belong to. This is what haunts me most about our information disorder: the victim is rarely allowed to remain human. In a polarised democracy, this is not a minor distortion; it is a method of political seeing.

Often, a woman becomes a symbol. A migrant becomes a threat. A Muslim becomes a demographic anxiety. A refugee becomes an invasion. A poor family becomes encroachment. A dead body becomes evidence for a narrative. A demolished home becomes a campaign slogan.

The person in the video disappears. The caption takes over.

This is the second life of violence.

It begins with an event. Then comes the recording. Then the caption, followed by a forward. People argue, counter-argue, and keep forwarding until, finally, the fact-check arrives. Somewhere in this chain, the victim is lost. This is another power of misinformation. It not only creates false belief. It creates exhaustion. It makes people ask, “What is even true anymore?” And once that question takes over, justice, equality and dignity under the law disappear from the conversation.

In the Dhaka-Bengal demolition clip, the violence was not gendered in the same way. It was coded differently, through religion, migration, poverty and suspicion. But the mechanism was identical. Real human distress was detached from its original context and attached to a political fantasy. The result was not just a false claim. It was a training in how to witness suffering without responsibility. That is the deeper crisis.

We have become extremely skilled at watching pain. We watch homes being broken, women being humiliated, mobs attacking, men bleeding, children crying. We watch these things on phones held inches from our faces. We forward them while eating dinner, waiting at airports, sitting in offices, lying in bed. Sometimes we forward out of concern. Sometimes out of outrage. Sometimes because someone we trust has sent it first. At other times because silence feels like moral failure.

But before pressing forward, we rarely ask the most crucial question: what am I turning this person’s pain into? Am I helping the truth to travel, or am I helping a caption overpower it?

In the old world, violence could be hidden. That was a form of moral negligence. But in the new world, violence can be overexposed and still remain misunderstood.

Visibility has become a poor substitute for justice. And virality, for truth.

The most dangerous misinformation today is not always the loudest lie. It is the quiet relocation of suffering. A clip moves from Dhaka to Bengal. A riot moves from one decade to another. A victim moves from personhood to propaganda. A fact becomes a weapon because someone found the right caption for it.

(Saadia Azim is the author of Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent, and True [Simon & Schuster], which explores information disorders in the public domain)