India is one of the world’s most connected societies, and that connectivity has made information abundant, but trust fragile.

Misinformation doesn’t just mislead people. It rearranges relationships, reshapes institutions, and rewires democracy.

The real question is no longer “Is misinformation a problem?” It’s “How much damage are we willing to normalise?”

Where India Stands: High Concern, Massive Exposure

To understand India’s misinformation reality, we need to hold two truths at once: India is worried about misinformation, and India is structurally exposed to it.

A Pew Research Center 35-country survey (Spring 2024 fieldwork) found that 65% of Indians say “made-up news and information” is a “very big problem” in their country, and 81% say it is at least a moderately big problem. This places India among the countries where about two-thirds see misinformation as a severe national issue, not a fringe worry.

The exposure base is enormous. Government-linked data shows India had 954.4 million internet subscribers as of March 2024 (with 398.35 million rural subscribers). TRAI’s later estimates put internet subscribers at 971.5 million by end-Sep 2024. Independent digital reports estimate 806 million internet users at the start of 2025 and roughly 491 million social media user identities.

Now translate this into what it means: when a country has ~1 billion internet subscriptions and hundreds of millions on social platforms, misinformation is no longer an “online” problem, it becomes a mass-behaviour problem.

And the anxiety is not new. Even as early as 2019, 77% of Indians told Pew they were very or somewhat concerned about people being exposed to false information when using mobile phones.

Why It Spreads: India’s Perfect Storm

Misinformation spreads everywhere, but it spreads distinctly well in India because of four compounding conditions:

Scale + speed. With nearly a billion internet subscriptions, the cost of a falsehood reaching millions is near zero, it only needs to be shareable once.

Trust networks beat news networks. Much of misinformation arrives not from strangers, but from family, neighbours, local leaders, and community groups — sources people emotionally trust. This is why debunks often fail: corrections compete with relationships, not just content.

Language and local ecosystems. India’s linguistic diversity makes moderation, fact-checking, and media literacy uneven across regions. A claim debunked in English or one state can thrive unchallenged elsewhere.

Algorithms reward emotion. Platforms optimise for engagement, and engagement is often built on outrage, fear, and moral certainty. That means misinformation doesn’t just spread — it gets structurally “helped.”

This is why global institutions treat the issue as systemic. The World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation among the top short-term global risks in its Global Risks Report 2024, and said it remained a top short-term risk again in Global Risks Report 2025. This isn’t about one country or one election — it’s about the information environment becoming unstable.

What It Does to People, Families, and Society

Misinformation’s first damage is psychological. It turns ordinary citizens into anxious investigators: Is this true? Is the government hiding something? Is that doctor lying? Over time, it trains the mind to distrust — and then it offers a substitute: belief built not on evidence, but on identity.

At the individual level, misinformation can cost money, health, and dignity — fake financial advice, fabricated job scams, medical misinformation, and reputational attacks. The loss is often silent: the person doesn’t report it, because admitting you were fooled feels like admitting weakness.

At the family level, misinformation becomes a relationship toxin. In many Indian homes, WhatsApp forwards don’t stay as forwards — they become arguments about politics, religion, medicine, and morality. The conflict is rarely about the claim itself; it’s about what the claim symbolises: Who are you becoming? Who do you trust? A constant drip of misinformation turns disagreement into suspicion — and suspicion into emotional distance.

At the societal level, misinformation breaks the shared floor of reality. Communities stop arguing about solutions and start arguing about facts. That shift is deadly because democracy depends on disagreement — but it cannot survive when citizens no longer share a basic sense of what happened.

India has already seen how rumours can translate into real-world harm. Reports around WhatsApp rumours have been linked to episodes of mob violence and lynching, with victims targeted on the basis of false claims circulated through messages. These are not “internet stories.” They are tragedies produced by an information system where virality outruns verification.

How It Endangers Democracy: Lessons From the World

Misinformation becomes a democratic threat when it does three things: delegitimises institutions, dehumanises opponents, and justifies extraordinary actions.

Pew’s 2025 report itself shows a key democratic link: in many countries, people who see made-up news as a very big problem are less satisfied with how democracy is working. That is how the rot begins — not with a coup, but with the steady belief that nothing is trustworthy.

Global examples show where the road can lead:

United States (Jan 6, 2021): false claims about election fraud were central to the atmosphere that fuelled the Capitol attack and a wider erosion of trust in electoral outcomes.

Brazil (Jan 8, 2023): thousands stormed key government buildings amid false claims of electoral fraud, with research and official summaries noting how disinformation ecosystems helped mobilise anger against institutions.

Myanmar (Rohingya crisis): the UN fact-finding mission said Facebook played a “determining role” in spreading hate and inflaming violence, a reminder that misinformation isn’t only about elections; it can be about life, identity, and survival.

These examples matter for India not because India is “the same,” but because the mechanism is similar: when misinformation becomes identity, compromise becomes betrayal, and institutions become enemies.

What India Needs to Do: A Realistic, Democratic Path Forward

India doesn’t need a single silver bullet. It needs a layered approach that respects free speech while reducing harm, because a democracy cannot fight misinformation by becoming afraid of speech itself.

1) Build media literacy like civic infrastructure.
Not as one-off campaigns, but as a curriculum and a culture, especially in regional languages. The point is not to turn everyone into journalists; it is to help citizens recognise manipulation, incentives, and emotional bait.

2) Make platforms transparent where it matters most.
If algorithms amplify content, there must be meaningful accountability around what is boosted and why, particularly for political, health, and financial content. “Neutral platform” claims do not hold when systems shape behaviour at scale.

3) Strengthen fact-checking ecosystems without turning them into moral police.
Fact-checking must be fast, multilingual, and locally distributed. But it must also remain credible, corrections should be evidence-led, not ideology-led, or they will deepen distrust rather than repair it.

4) Focus on harm reduction, not headline regulation.
Bad regulation often creates two failures: it chills legitimate speech and still fails to stop misinformation. A better approach is targeted, transparent, appealable action against clear harms: impersonation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, manipulated media used to incite violence, and dangerous medical falsehoods.

India already has the concern. Pew’s data shows that clearly. The task now is to convert concern into capability: citizens who pause before sharing, platforms that don’t profit from chaos, and institutions that earn trust not through authority, but through consistency.

Misinformation cannot be eliminated. But it can be contained, the way societies contain disease: by strengthening immunity, reducing exposure, and responding quickly when outbreaks appear. The future of Indian democracy will not be decided only by elections, courts, or policies, it will also be decided by whether we can still agree on what is real enough to argue about.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of The Logical Take, a commentary section of The Logical Indian. The views expressed are based on research, constitutional values, and the author’s analysis of publicly reported events. They are intended to encourage informed public discourse and do not seek to target or malign any community, institution, or individual.

Also Read: The Logical Take: National Startup Day Celebration Is Easy, Honest Stocktaking Is Harder