BBC’s report on fake news removed from its website, will be ‘re-published soon’

On November 12, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had published a report titled Duty, Identity, Credibility: ‘Fake News’ and the ordinary citizen in India on its website, which shed light on the fake news industry currently plaguing India.

The 105-page report, which was available for download on the BBC website, received heavy criticism from the Right-wing and was slammed for the methodology adopted by them (BBC) to reach their conclusion of “nationalism is driving the spread of fake news.”

However, the report, in its entirety, has been removed from the website ever since the weekend and remains unavailable for download as of today i.e. November 19, 2018.

When Newslaundry reached out to the BBC in an effort to find out why was there a 404 error showing on the page where the report was previously available for download, we were told that this was done so as to add more information around the methodology that was used for this research.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The report is being updated to include a section with details on the methodology.  It will be re-published as soon as these details have been added.”

A tweet from Trushar Barot, Digital Launch Editor, BBC Indian Languages, stated the same.

The BBC research paper/report also received flak for wrongly accusing The Better India of spreading fake news. When they (The Better India) emailed BBC regarding this, the latter stated, in a private email, that they had “made a human error when scanning a wide range of media for our report on fake news” and that “The Better India should not have been included.”