When you spend all your time worrying about social justice and intersectional feminism, basic literacy can often take a backseat.
Far left propaganda channel NDTV today took some time off from its usual routine of bashing Hindus and spreading hate to talk about, of all things, technology. It ran a segment featuring guests who spoke about WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, and how other messaging services fared in comparison. One of the guests on the show spoke about end-to-end encryption, which allows no one other than the sender and receiver of a message to know what the content of the message is — not even the platform itself.
This was clearly a concept that was alien to the good folks at NDTV.
“With end-to-end inscription move, Facebook voluntarily removed it’s own ability to read your messages,” says Pranesh Prakash, Tech Policy Researcher, Information Society Project, Yale Law School,” NDTV tweeted. Now it’s not clear what end-to-end “inscription” is — NDTV reporters presumably think that slave labour hammers down inscriptions into servers using hammers and chisels at WhatsApp’s headquarters — but this was about as accurate as the rest of NDTV’s reporting. The tweet, of course, should’ve said ‘encryption’, which is a fairly common word which means encoding information into a code to prevent unauthorized access.
Now that should’ve been enough of a blunder for one tweet, but NDTV, being NDTV, managed to fit in another howler in 280 characters. At the end of the tweet, NDTV added the hashtag #DanaMining, which, again, like the rest of NDTV’s reporting, is absolute gibberish. The hashtag should’ve read Data Mining, which means finding patterns in large amounts of data using statistical techniques and algorithms.
And if you thought that the poor staffer didn’t have a technical background and was forced to write about stuff they had no idea about — again, much like NDTV’s reporting — it turns out they were no great shakes at English either. In the tweet, NDTV said WhatsApp had removed “it’s” ability to read messages, which is grammatically incorrect — the tweet should’ve instead said ‘its’, which is the possessive form, and not ‘it’s’, which is a contraction.
NDTV, meanwhile, was running a campaign recently in which it was calling itself the most trusted name in news.
