Internews in collaboration with DataLeads and with support from Google.org and the Google News Initiative, wanted to understand why people fall for misinformation, what signals they rely on to evaluate online sources and what makes this population susceptible to misinformation in order to design a news and information literacy program.

To answer these questions, the team (FactShala) conducted a pilot study in consultation with the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and analysed a total of 1955 responses from 391 respondents coming from over 90 cities and 25 villages in 23 states in India.