BOOK Q&A
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Saadia Azim
Saadia is the author of Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent and True (Simon & Schuster India, 2026) and a public policy expert researching the digital divide and internet rights. She serves as Chief Operating Officer of the Government of West Bengal’s flagship digital public-service delivery programme, overseeing a network of more than 5,000 digital kiosks. Previously a journalist and a public affairs professional at the U.S. Mission in India, she draws on extensive field experience in underserved communities to examine how misinformation travels, whom it harms and what it reveals about the fragility of today’s information ecosystem.
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Sindhu Rajasekaran (SR): Congratulations on writing this timely book! We live in an age of misinformation and AI generated slop, where fact checking feels like a thing of the past. Do you think there was a specific time globally/nationally when data/news lost its integrity? I'm a millennial, and I have grown up with the internet. The current state of affairs online/offline is appalling.
Saadia Azim (SZ): I share your sense of alarm. But I don’t think there is one precise moment when information suddenly lost its integrity. There was no single morning on which we woke up and truth had disappeared. What happened was more gradual: several changes in media, politics, technology and public behaviour converged until misinformation became easier to produce, distribute and believe.
Misinformation, of course, is not new. Rumour, propaganda, doctored photographs and politically convenient statistics existed long before the internet. States, political parties, corporations and even conventional news organisations have always selected which facts to foreground and which to conceal. The difference today is one of scale, speed, identity and infrastructure.
The twenty-four-hour news cycle was one important turning point. News organisations had enormous amounts of airtime to fill, and the distinction between something important and something merely new began to weaken. “Breaking news” gradually became less a description of significance and more a strategy for holding attention. Speed started competing with verification.
The internet then dismantled the old gatekeeping structure. This democratised expression in valuable ways: marginalised communities could speak, citizen journalists could document events, and information could bypass powerful institutions. But decentralisation came without adequate credibility filters. The authority to publish was democratised; the responsibility and systems needed to establish credibility were not.
Social media completed this transformation by turning information into engagement. What circulated most widely was no longer necessarily what was most useful or accurate, but what generated the strongest reaction. Then smartphones and messaging platforms moved this information disorder into our most trusted spaces such as family groups, neighbourhood networks, alumni groups and conversations between friends. A false claim no longer arrived only from an unknown propagandist. It arrived from an uncle, a former teacher or a friend saying, “This may be important—please share.”
That distinction matters enormously. We often trust the sender before evaluating the information. I describe this condition in the book as a “Trust Cage”: credibility begins to attach itself to familiarity rather than evidence. We believe something because it has come through someone we know, and that person may have shared it for exactly the same reason. Earlier, we trusted figures of authority, teachers, doctors and elders but today, we increasingly trust those who look and sound like us.
Politics recognised the potential of this infrastructure. Data allowed citizens to be segmented into ever smaller emotional constituencies. Different groups could receive different versions of reality each designed around their particular fears, resentments or aspirations. Once the common newspaper or evening bulletin was replaced by personalised feeds, we no longer merely disagreed about the meaning of events. Increasingly, we stopped encountering the same events.
AI-generated material is therefore not the beginning of this crisis. It powerfully accelerates a system already in place. AI dramatically lowers the technical barriers to fabrication, reducing the need for specialised skills, and makes falsehoods abundant, personalised and plausible. But the deeper problem predates generative AI: an information economy in which speed matters more than evidence, emotion outruns context, and visibility is often mistaken as credibility.
I would also gently resist the idea that fact-checking is entirely a thing of the past. There is excellent fact-checking being done. The problem is that fact-checking is usually asked to arrive after the emotional and political work of misinformation has already been accomplished. A fact-check corrects a claim; it cannot always reverse the fear, suspicion or hatred the claim has deposited.
So, rather than saying that data lost its integrity at one moment, I would say that the conditions protecting its integrity were progressively dismantled. Verification is slower than circulation, public communication has become personalised persuasion, and information has ceased to exist primarily as a public good.
SR: You write: "Content no longer informs; it incites. It isn’t shared to communicate. It commands attention. It weaponises belief." Can you speak a little more about this? About "breaking news" and "viral content" and the architecture of falsehood?
SZ: When I write that content no longer merely informs but incites, I am pointing to a fundamental shift in what information is designed to do.
Traditionally, we assumed that news would tell us what had happened. Today, much of what appears in the form of news is designed to make us do something immediately—to click, react, condemn, fear, buy, vote, forward or join a side. We have designed the unit of value as engagement/activity not understanding.
“Breaking news” illustrates this perfectly. Something may be labelled breaking not because it changes our understanding of the world, but because urgency prevents us from looking away. The flashing banner, dramatic music, countdown, capital letters and repeated images create a bodily response before they create knowledge. The audience is placed in a permanent state of emergency.
Viral content operates through the same logic. It has to be compressed, emotionally legible and instantly shareable. The social media platforms have already created a simple format. Complexity is an obstacle because complexity makes us pause. A slogan travels better than an explanation; a villain travels better than a structural problem; an image travels better than its history.
The architecture of falsehood is therefore larger than the original lie. It includes the platform that rewards it, the algorithm that amplifies it, the influencer who performs it, the television debate that legitimises it by discussing it, and the ordinary user who forwards it. A fabricated claim becomes socially powerful because an entire distribution system gives it repetition, visibility and emotional force.
And misinformation need not always be fabricated. Some of the most dangerous content contains real material placed inside a false frame. A genuine video from one country is circulated as evidence of an event in another. An old photograph is given a new date. A true statistic is stripped of its denominator. A private detail is exposed to humiliate someone. Reality is not invented. It is just rearranged.
This is what I sometimes think of as moral theft: real suffering is stolen and given a false address. The image may be real, the pain may be real, but the caption turns it into evidence for an unrelated political story. In that moment, the people in the image cease to be human beings and become raw material for somebody else’s narrative.
That is why I write that content “weaponizes belief.” The objective is not always to convince us of a completely new idea. It is often to activate what we already suspect, fear or desire. The most effective falsehood whispers: “You were right all along.”
We should therefore stop treating virality as a neutral measure of popularity. Virality is often engineered visibility. And visibility is not evidence.
SR: This is spot on: "And citizens, like sheep following their shepherd, find themselves navigating this ocean of digital information with limited tools for discernment. Constantly bombarded, they shift from one issue to another with little energy to dwell deeply on complex problems. The barrage of information exhausts them and their attention [to] fragments. In such circumstances, sustained democratic engagement becomes difficult; reaction replaces reflection." --- This is currently a global problem, with all so-called democracies. Citizens have no space to reflect. There's only space for outrage. How can we build sustainable knowledge networks in times like this?
SZ: The first thing is to recognise that information exhaustion is not simply an individual failure of discipline. It is structural. People are not necessarily careless or unintelligent; they are operating within systems designed to fragment their attention.
Every notification makes a small claim on us. Every outrage asks us to select a side. We move from war to election, scandal to communal tension, disaster to celebrity controversy often within the same hour. We are informed about everything and able to dwell on almost nothing. That condition is profoundly damaging to democracy because democratic judgment requires time, context, memory and the capacity to tolerate complexity.
Sustainable knowledge networks could be those that create what our current platforms remove: the context, the continuity and trusted human mediation.
First, we need smaller communities of verification. A family WhatsApp group, school community, neighbourhood association or professional network can develop simple norms as a civic practice: identify the original source, separate evidence from opinion, add context, correct a false claim visibly, and resist forwarding merely because something feels urgent. Knowledge networks do not have to begin as grand institutions. They can begin with ordinary communities changing what counts as responsible participation.
Second, fact-checking must move upstream. We cannot rely only on professional fact-checkers to chase every viral claim after it has circulated. Media literacy must become part of everyday civic literacy. Citizens should learn to ask: Who wants me to believe this? Why has it reached me now? What emotion is it trying to trigger? What is missing from the frame? Can I find the original source?
This is more useful than merely asking, “Is it true or false?” Many harmful messages contain some truth. The crucial questions concern context, intent and impact.
Third, institutions must show their work. Governments, news organisations, universities and technology companies often demand trust while providing little transparency about how decisions were made. But trust cannot be restored through authority. It has to be built through accessible data, clear sourcing, timely communication, correction mechanisms and explainable decisions. Trust is not merely a feeling; it is infrastructure. Like a bridge, it must be built, inspected and repaired.
Fourth, we need “slow information” spaces, public broadcasters, libraries, community media, classrooms, long-form journalism and moderated conversations where an issue remains present long enough to be understood. Reflection does not happen automatically. It requires environments that protect attention from constant capture.
We must also recover the value of silence. The digital system tells us that participation means immediate reaction. But choosing not to forward, not to comment instantly, and not to perform an opinion before understanding an issue can be a form of civic agency.
A pause is not passivity. Sometimes the pause is where responsibility begins.
Ultimately, a sustainable knowledge network is not simply a network that distributes more information. It is one that preserves context, welcomes correction, remembers what happened yesterday and allows people to change their minds without humiliation.
SR: Tell me a little bit about the psychology of political misinformation, and how it travels through society.
SZ: Political misinformation succeeds because it rarely approaches us as a neutral factual proposition. It enters through identity, emotion and social belonging.
People do not assess every claim as detached investigators. We interpret information through what we already know or think we know about our community, history, religion, nation and political opponents. When a message confirms this internal map, it meets less resistance. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, but in political life it is often deeper than bias. Accepting or rejecting a claim can become a declaration of loyalty.
This is why correcting political misinformation can be so difficult. If I tell someone that a claim shared by their community is false, they may hear something more threatening: that their group is foolish, their leader is dishonest, or their identity is under attack. The factual correction becomes an emotional confrontation.
Fear is especially powerful because it collapses time. A message saying that a community is “taking over,” that children are in danger, or that the nation is being betrayed demands an immediate response. It makes verification appear almost irresponsible: why pause when the threat is supposedly urgent?
Anger performs a different function. It provides moral certainty. It tells people not only that something is wrong, but also who should be blamed. Humiliation, resentment and the desire for revenge are equally effective because they turn complicated political conditions into emotionally satisfying stories with clear heroes and villains.
Misinformation travels through repetition, carrying the baggage of all these human emotions. A claim encountered once may appear doubtful. Encountered across WhatsApp, television, YouTube, political speeches and conversations with friends, it acquires familiarity. And familiarity is frequently mistaken for independent confirmation, even when every version originated from the same source.
Political misinformation therefore does not only make people believe an incorrect fact. It changes how they see other human beings. That is when misinformation turns viral, violent and, finally, “true”—not necessarily because the underlying claim has become accurate, but because it begins to organise behaviour, policy and public memory as though it were true.
SR: What do you hope for, and how do we rebuild the Information Commons?
SZ: I remain hopeful, but not passively hopeful. The information environment we have was built through political choices, commercial incentives and design decisions. It can therefore be redesigned.
In the book, I use the idea of the Information Commons. Historically, a commons was a shared well, river, forest or grazing field. Everyone depended on it, and therefore everyone carried some responsibility for protecting it. Today, information is one of our most important shared resources. We use it to vote, seek healthcare, understand our neighbours, assess danger and hold power accountable.
But the old public square has drifted into private feeds. Information that should support collective judgment is filtered by systems designed primarily to maximise engagement and profit. The commons is no longer simply shared; it is mined. Our attention is extracted, our fears are harvested, and our identities are segmented for persuasion.
Rebuilding the commons requires responsibility at several levels.
Platforms must be made more transparent and accountable for amplification, not merely content removal. The critical question is not only, “Who created this falsehood?” but “What system made it visible to millions?” Recommendation systems, political advertising, automated accounts and coordinated amplification cannot remain hidden behind the language of proprietary technology.
Governments must communicate promptly and transparently, especially during conflict, elections, health crises and communal tension. An information vacuum is never empty for long; rumour enters it immediately. At the same time, government fact-checking must not become a mechanism for declaring inconvenient journalism “false.” Verification requires institutional independence, published evidence and the possibility of appeal.
News organisations must recover their role as builders of public understanding. That means distinguishing news from spectacle, investing in field reporting, correcting errors prominently, and refusing to convert every disagreement into a shouting contest. Journalism cannot defeat misinformation by imitating its methods.
Schools and universities must teach information judgment across disciplines. Digital literacy is not merely learning how to operate a device. It includes understanding evidence, sources, statistics, visual manipulation, algorithms and persuasive intent.
And citizens have responsibilities too. Before forwarding, we can ask what the message is asking us to feel and whom it may harm. We can correct people without humiliating them. We can preserve the dignity of those shown in violent images. We can resist turning another person’s suffering into political entertainment.
My hope is not for a perfectly truthful world. Such a world has never existed. My hope is for an information culture in which falsehood encounters friction and truth has durable institutions behind it.