Fact verified: Disney isn’t replacing Mickey Mouse as its official mascot

The Walt Disney Company is replacing Mickey Mouse as its mascot with Figment, a small purple dragon, after 100 years. ” This was among thousands of forwarded messages including, “US and Russia are considering banning ChatGPT because it divulges sensitive information about their countries’ armed advancements” and “According to US geological survey, earthquakes with a magnitude of 7. 8 or more will continue to occur in Turkey, Tajikistan, and Syria through February 28th and March 1st”, that TOI recently busted as fake.

Under the ‘Times Verified’ campaign, readers send suspicious messages circulating on social media to this paper on the WhatsApp number 9819888887. To verify their credibility, our expert panel — made up of reporters, editors and representatives from the municipality and the government —taps into its carefully-cultivated network of trustworthy sources.

Launched nationally on November21 last year, the ‘Times Verified’ initiative aims to break the chain of viral misinformation and disinformation that has been infecting social media groups. Since the launch, TOI’s editorial team has received nearly 1. 3 lakh messages, half of which turned out to be false.

Besides misleading headlines such as “Landmark judgement passed by Indian Government for women to have the right to three days of menstrual leave a month, with the option of extending it to five days; starting 15th March 2023” to “More than 1000 crores of fake currency in the denomination of 500/will be circulated in India post Holi, warn RBI officials”, the deluge of misinformation also included false good news such as: “Tata Group-owned Air India currently announced 50% concession on Air India base ticket fares permanently for senior citizens over 60 years. ”

Having ballooned beyond articles and tweets bearing falsehoods, misinformation is becoming harder to distinguish from fact in the era of AI globally — a phenomenon worsened by India’s multiplicity of languages. A recent book by Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge university, explains why our brains are so vulnerable to misinformation, how it spreads across social networks, and what we can do to protect ourselves and others. In it, he advocates “pre-bunking” of a false claim by mentioning it and warning against it in advance.

In this backdrop, the job of the readers who have been regularly forwarding dubious messages to help TOI identify red flags, becomes significant. Among this vigilant army of chain-breakers are UP’s Alok Mishra, Delhi’s Dr Neeraj Saxena and Maharashtra’s Sriram, Vivek Amonkar and Surendra Shroff. To join them, send anxiety-causing headlines doing the rounds of social media networks to our expert panel who, in turn, promise to — as Sander van der Linden would put it —‘inoculate’ you against lies.




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