New Delhi: The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting on Thursday (January 12, 2023) said that it has busted six YouTube channels that were working in a coordinated manner and spreading false information in India. These six channels were found to be operating as part of a coordinated disinformation network and had over 20 lakh subscribers. According to the Ministry, their videos have been watched over 51 crore times and spread fake news about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elections, proceedings in the Supreme Court and Parliament of India, the functioning of the Government of India, etc. 


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They also made false claims regarding the ban on Electronic Voting Machines (ECMs), and false statements attributed to senior Constitutional functionaries including the President of India and the Chief Justice of India.



"The channels are part of a fake news economy that thrives on monetization of fake news. The channels use fake, clickbait and sensational thumbnails and images of television news anchors of TV Channels to mislead the viewers to believe that the news was authentic and drive traffic to their channels in order to monetize the videos published by them," the IB Ministry said.


The PIB Fact Check Unit (FCU) of the Ministry also released six separate Twitter threads having over 100 fact-checks to counter the fake news spread by these channels. 



These are the following "fake news peddling" YouTube channels: Nation Tv (5.57 lakh subscribers), Samvaad Tv (10.9 lakh subscribers), Sarokar Bharat (over 21,000 subscribers), Nation 24 (over 25,000 subscribers), Swarnim Bharat (over 6,000 subscribers) and Samvaad Samachar (over 3.48 lakh subscribers).