Audiences with little interest in news are therefore exposed to limited content – in terms of depth – on platforms, for which they exercise rapid judgment. Beyond the way in which information is processed and presented on media websites, the interactions between these and their potential audiences are often shaped upstream, in the way in which platforms prioritize and present information. It would therefore be incumbent on platforms to examine more carefully the role played by their design decisions and technologies in users’ evaluation of information, but also on publishers to use platforms in a reasoned manner, without abusing the commercial and distribution opportunities of these platforms.
4 min Share “But tell the truth about today’s India,” shouts Rana Ayyub to a petrified room. The Washington Post columnist in India, 1.75 m tall, wearing a vermilion red suit and her hair down, is the guest twitter data of the international journalism festival in Perugia (Italy) . Like the Philippine Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, director of the news site Rappler , she today embodies the fight for freedom of the press and against cyber harassment.
Rana Ayyub almost didn’t take her plane to Italy. The Indian federal police said they feared that she would organize her escape from the country, she who is facing several investigations. “A policeman questioned me about a bill for 2.5 euros,” explains the journalist. By Pascal Doucet-Bon, Deputy Director of Information "The Gujarat Files" 2010, Ahmedabad, capital of the state of Gujarat, India. A young unknown 26-year-old, Maithili Tyagi, approaches the Hindu fundamentalist party in power in the state. She claims to be an American academic filmmaker of Indian origin, "with the right accent", she jokes today, who has come to make a documentary on the rising party, the BJP, a fundamentalist and Hindu nationalist organization.
She too is Hindu, the politicians believe. In fact, Rana Ayyoub is a journalist, an Indian citizen, a Muslim, and certainly carries a visible camera, but also "8 hidden cameras and microphones"! For eight months, she documents the secret agenda of the BJP in Ahmedabad . Narendra Modi's party has not yet conquered federal power; it will do so four years later. She self-published a book that has now sold 700,000 copies in 17 languages: " Gujarat Files: Anatomy Of A Cover Up ". In it, we learn that the murders of Muslims in riots in Gujarat, a few months earlier, were covered up, consistently, by the BJP state.