The dirt roads leading to the village were unusually empty. All the locals were holed up inside their homes. Alarmed, the officers patrolling the village informed their boss, Rema Rajeshwari, at a police station in Telangana state in south India. It was surprising to see villagers hiding, she recalls. But why were they hiding? “It was like a self-imposed curfew,” Rajeshwari says. A video that had been circulating in this village in Jogulamba Gadwal district and hundreds of other villages in Telangana had everyone spooked. “First of all, this was a remote village and my boys were surprised almost everyone had a smartphone — Chinese smartphones — and mobile data,” Rajeshwari says. She ordered the officers to collect the videos, and they gathered about 135 — plus voice messages and photos — from the villagers’ phones. Some videos were in Hindi, and some were in the regional languages of Kannada and Telugu. Many were fake. With 400 villages under her jurisdiction, in two districts of Telangana, Rajeshwari assigned officers to go door-to-door to warn villagers against these fake videos and fake news. |