The following is an excerpt from Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent and True by Saadia Azim, published by Simon & Schuster India.Let’s look at another tragic case from Kolkata. In August 2024, its calm was shattered by the brutal rape and murder of a young postgraduate trainee doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College. Her body was discovered in a seminar hall after a gruelling 36-hour shift, bearing horrific signs of assault, throttle marks, deep wounds and other grievous injuries. The news first appeared in mainstream media as yet another tragic report of violence against women. Then came the public outrage. Doctors across states went on strike. Candlelight marches and protests swept through over 130 cities, demanding accountability and safety for medical professionals. That coverage came nearly one and a half months after the actual incident. As fury peaked, the narrative splintered. Misinformation began circulating on social media, with users posing as eyewitnesses of the postmortem report, sharing graphic images and unverifiable claims; particularly allegations of gang rape, which were unchecked and spread rapidly. These were later debunked by forensic reports. The accused was already in judicial custody and had been apprehended early on in the investigation. Still, the mass hysteria did not subside. Allegations emerged that the hospital and police had tampered with evidence, eventually prompting a CBI probe on a different case related to corruption. In the process, the lens quietly shifted from the lived risks faced by women at work to the spectacle of institutional failure, leaving the gendered dimension of the violence less visible. As the protests grew louder, the conversation slipped into the orbit of political bigwigs, where disinformation, personal attacks and the communal framing of the crime began to dominate the narrative. Amid this chaos, the public’s ability to discern fact from fiction began to fray. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci warns, disinformation doesn’t just deceive, it drains our emotional reserves. When every fact comes with a counterclaim and every verified report is met with suspicion, it leads to truth fatigue: a psychological numbness where people grow weary of outrage and begin to distrust all narratives, even truthful ones. In the R.G. Kar Medical College case, initial empathy gave way to exhaustion. Questions like ‘What’s really true?’ replaced calls for justice. Democracy, once a platform for participatory action becomes performative. Victims are not just failed by the system, but by the fog of digital confusion that obscure their stories. Falsity as a symptomWhat makes these falsehoods stick with users is their emotional precision. Misinformation today is not solely about making you believe a lie; it’s about making you feel something so strongly that you don’t stop to verify whether it’s true or not. Outrage replaces inquiry. Nationalism trumps nuance. And in that swirl, digital mercenaries — some paid influencers, some ideological volunteers — do the rest. Platforms have scaled back moderation. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and later rebranded it as X, the platform underwent sweeping layoffs that significantly reduced its trust-and-safety workforce. Further its external advisory council was dissolved, raising concerns among researchers and regulators about weakened safeguards against misinformation and abuse. Elon Musk repeatedly framed Community Notes as a decentralised alternative to traditional moderation, arguing that truth should emerge from collective user consensus rather than from platform authorities. Indian users report posts faster than they’re reviewed, leaving grievances to pile up unanswered. Google and Meta who when under pressure to appear neutral, retreat into silence. Meanwhile, thousands of ‘news’ handles operate without bylines or accountability, feeding users a steady diet of algorithm-friendly outrage. Turn on any news debate on TV and you’ll hear panellists casually dismiss sources with a shrug. Scroll through social media and the refrain is constant, ‘I don’t believe the news anymore.’ A New York Times technology reporter, Tiffany Hsu, elaborates, ‘People now have a hard time knowing what to believe and not to believe in the era of misinformation, where AI-generated content floods our feeds — creating a pervasive distrust of everything.’ The result is a liar’s dividend; in a world where all claims are questioned, the ones with something to hide benefit the most. A doctored clip showing a minister apologising can be disowned. A real clip showing misconduct can be dismissed as ‘AI-generated’. In other words, the very presence of fakes makes it easier for liars to dismiss the truth.In India, where political allegiance can define perspectives, disinformation becomes a social adhesive. It travels faster when it comes from someone you know, a family member sending a WhatsApp message, a local influencer sharing a news scoop, a temple speaker reading out ‘news’ during evening aarti. This intimacy gives falsehoods legitimacy. But therein also lies the solution. American digital propaganda scholar Samuel Woolley emphasises, misinformation grips most effectively when it originates from sources we trust, similarly truth relies on that same credibility. His research shows that algorithmic amplification can weaponise our trust in familiar voices, making falsehoods more infectious. When someone we believe in — be it a friend, influencer or community leader — shares misleading content, our cognitive defences weaken and we lower our guard, allowing disinformation to spread unchecked. Woolley’s studies on computational propaganda and perception engineering reveal a paradox; while we rely on trusted connections, these very networks can become vectors for deception.152 Furthermore broader research on media ecosystems note that, the internet has created countless ways to access information but trust in the news media and in institutions like medicine and science are at an all-time low.153 In such an environment, the line between credible content and malicious mimicry blurs and each of us in turn, become the creator, user, forwarder and influencer making it even harder to distinguish fact from fabrication. The landscape keeps shifting. The same person can amplify truth at one moment and spread falsehood the next, often without realising it. Such fluid roles dissolve clear boundaries, leaving misinformation free to circulate unchecked. Recognising when we ourselves are becoming the vector — and choosing to step back from it — can be one of the most effective ways to break the chain. In today’s hyper-networked ecosystem, where multiple channels of communication transmit information in countless formats — text, voice notes, memes, videos, AI-generated avatars — the same message is received, reshaped and resent by diverse groups of known and unknown actors. This fragmentation of truth across a complex web of dissemination doesn’t only amplify noise. It arms it. What emerges is not merely a misinformed public but a full-blown digital storm, where falsehood functions like a precision-guided strike, hitting different communities at different times with untailored impact. The situation is not just chaotic; it is strategically confounding. Much like the Chakravyuh of the Mahabharata — that inescapable military formation — everyone today lives within their own personalised storm of data: cyclical, isolating and unknowingly self-reinforced. The architecture of the internet, built for openness, now traps users in algorithmic whirlpools, where truth is relative, emotions are currency and exit routes are unclear. In this system, content that provokes anger or drives offline action is rewarded as ‘great content’ even if it is a lie. The more it generates emotion, the more it guarantees amplification, thus ensuring that falsehoods are not just seen but widely followed. In such a scenario, misinformation doesn’t remain a byproduct. It converts into a recurring force that shapes behaviours, inflames identities and distorts collective memory. In our age of hyperconnectivity, the digital citizen is no longer a passive consumer of information; they are simultaneously the sender, receiver, editor, copywriter, creator, director and producer. Each share, forward or post becomes a layered act of authorship, yet rarely is this complexity acknowledged or scrutinised. How one individual does justice to all these roles — each with its own ethical weight and responsibility — remains beyond the scope of examination. What is certain, however, is the overwhelming burden these roles place on every participant in the digital ecosystem. The overdose of digital activity, constant content creation, curation, correction and commentary does not empower so much as it exhausts. The result is a communication ecosystem overloaded with voices but starved of accountability. In this noisy realm, clarity is sacrificed at the altar of speed and identity is fragmented across platforms, each demanding performance over presence. The digital citizen, therefore, is not liberated by their many roles; they are buried beneath them. The counter to digital storms may not be institutional alone. It may lie in re-humanising information, one conversation at a time.