Debunking False News: Inside and Outside the Classroom Vibodh Parthasarathi and Andreas Mattsson The Swedish phrase “sanningssägare”---literally, “truth-tellers”---offers an intriguing window to the world of social media in our times. Lately, it has been absorbed by and used to describe a person who says something that they might think should be ‘the truth’ in a context when others don’t really care about what is true or false. In digital on the digital spread of coverage from national elections, right-wing candidates and their supporters have proclaimed to be “tellers of the real truth” – an euphemism for tellers of “alternative facts”. Thus, in the digital politics characterising our times, the word “sanningssägare” has been used frequently in tweets and posts to comments that are seen as “outspoken”, “fabricated” or a combination of both. Between 7 and 9 September 2018, a group of international media scholars and journalists gathered in a co-working space in the old dockyard of Hammarby in central Stockholm. Outnumbered by Swedish journalism students, the group consisted of Finnish fact-checkers, British and US media entrepreneurs, Swedish and Indian media scholars and journalism teachers. This diverse group’s mission was to monitor the spread of mis- information and dis-information on social media during the Swedish national elections. The first concern about fake news is the term itself. Terming it “fake” assumes, like in a painting, there exists somewhere an “original”, and hence a true, version--- of which one or more versions are fake, or unsanctioned, or illegitimate renditions. It is more accurate to term this misleading practice as False News---so there is no ambiguity about its veracity, at any level. The more magnanimous define “fake news” to be “fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent” (David et al 2018) 1. Journalists intervene in such debates by emphasising the distinction between reportage that is unverified and that which is knowingly false. Definitional clarity is crucial as it brings us to squarely eye-ball that what we are dealing with is falsity, process or otherwise. We are not dealing with versions of reportage or opinion---yours, mine, or theirs---but plain and simple falsehood. The second concern around False News is that it is not really a mistake--- either by a lowly paid reporter, a semi-skilled sub-editor, an overworked newsroom, or even a celebrity news anchor. False News is a business--- as much as it is politics. In India the situation in 2017 was markedly different as among the top ‘Fake News’ stories circulated by the mainstream media that year, none concerned party politics (Jawed 2018) 2 . The omnipresence of False News suggests, foremost, that in our times the business of truth seems to have few takers than that of falsity. Or to put it in another way, the market---the proverbial arbitrator in 1 David M. J. Lazer et al. ‘The science of fake news’, Science 9 March 2018 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1094 2 Sam Jawed, ’Top fake news stories circulated by Indian media in 2017’, AltNews 2 January 2018 https://www.altnews.in/top-fake-news-stories-circulated-indian-media-2017/