Muslims were the biggest target of false and misleading claims in the month of October, making up 11.6 per cent of all the claims we encountered last month, followed by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi (6.32 per cent), the Narendra Modi-led central government (5.26 per cent), and newly appointed British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (5.26 per cent).
While false claims in the past had consistently targeted Muslims and Gandhi, Sunak being targeted prominently last month coincided with him being appointed the British Prime Minister, following Liz Truss' exit from the post.
We published 95 fact-checks last month, each debunking a unique false/misleading claim. Our analysis revealed that most of such claims we encountered were political in nature, accounting for 45.3 per cent of our fact-checks, followed by international and communal claims, accounting for 14.7 per cent and 13.7 per cent, respectively.
We also categorised the claims according to the type of manipulation, and the purpose of sharing them.
We incorporated an existing typology provided by Claire Wardle of First Draft News, who categorised 'fake news' into the following types: Satire or Parody (also Humour), Misleading Content, Imposter Content, Fabricated Content, False Connection, False Context and Manipulated Content.
The most common type of manipulation was found to be 'misleading content' - misleading use of genuine content to frame an issue or individual, making up 32.6...
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