# When a Rumor Costs a Child’s Life: The Human Price of Misinformation
In the middle of March, measles began moving silently through communities across Bangladesh, and by May, the death toll among children had crossed five hundred. In the midst of this public health emergency, doctors and health workers were scrambling to launch mass vaccination campaigns, pleading with parents to bring their children forward for a single, lifesaving dose of medicine. And it was exactly at this moment—when every hour counted, when every missed appointment could mean a fever, a seizure, or a funeral—that a sentence began to spread across social media like a whisper that would not die. It was falsely attributed to health officials, beautifully formatted, shareable, and completely untrue: “There is no such thing as measles in the country.” No doctor said it. No ministry released it. It was a fabrication, born of nothing but mischief or malice. But somewhere, a mother scrolls through her phone, sees that sentence, hesitates, and does not bring her child to the vaccination centre that day. And in that single moment of hesitation, a rumor stops being a line of text and becomes a child with a ragged cough and a burning forehead, a hospital ward filled past capacity, a lifelong silence that no amount of likes or shares can ever undo.
As a doctor, I have seen the cost of disease, but I have also seen the cost of lies, and the latter is far harder to cure. The disease responds to medicine; the lie does not respond to anything but time and grief. This is why, for me, the conversation about rumors is never merely a political argument, a digital literacy seminar, or a talking point for the evening news. It is a question of public health, a question of safety, and ultimately, a question of whether we will still be able to trust one another at all. The numbers alone should humble us. In the first six months of this year, nine Bangladesh-based fact-checking organizations debunked more than three thousand distinct claims—1,804 in the first three months, another 1,265 in the next three. And even that dizzying figure is only the tip of the iceberg; it counts only the falsehoods that happened to come to someone’s attention, that got flagged, that someone had the time and the manpower to investigate. For every rumor that gets caught, how many slip through? How many sit quietly in family group chats, spreading person to person the way measles itself does?
Who are the people living inside this storm of falsehoods? As of August, Bangladesh counted more than seventy-five million Facebook users—roughly forty-two percent of the whole population—and the largest single age group among them is not middle-aged professionals or curious retirees. It is young people aged eighteen to twenty-four, a generation numbering around thirty million, who have never known a world without social media. This is a fact that can be read in two very different ways. One reading paints them as the most exposed, the most vulnerable: the ones most likely to be scrolling when a fake news card appears, the ones whose trust in institutions is still forming, the ones most likely to forward a shocking image without a second thought. But there is a second reading, and it matters far more. These thirty million young people are also the strongest line of defense we have. Because stopping a false post does not always require new laws or complex technology. Sometimes it requires just one decision—a single pause lasting no longer than two seconds, a brief moment of doubt before the finger presses the share button. In that moment, a rumor dies alone, unseen, harmless. Multiply that moment by thirty million, and you have something that looks remarkably like a defense system.
During the first three months of the year, around three-quarters of the misinformation that fact-checkers examined in connection with the thirteenth National Parliamentary Election was political in nature. And the most sophisticated tactic was not a clever argument or a stolen document; it was something far simpler and far more insidious: the fake news card. Between September 2025 and February 2026, researchers identified 690 of these cards—images that copied the logos, the typefaces, the layout of familiar and trusted news outlets, and used them to give fabricated statements the radiant credibility of genuine journalism. Almost half of the political misinformation circulating during that period originated from these counterfeit graphics, which meant that a reader could open a post in the morning, see the masthead of a newspaper they had read all their lives, and believe with complete confidence that a political leader had said something they had never said. The attack here is not merely directed at a particular leader or a specific party. It is an attack on the credibility of the news itself—on the one thing that ordinary people rely on to make sense of the world. And once people learn that even the logo of a familiar newspaper cannot be trusted, genuine news also struggles to reach them. The greatest success of a lie is not making people believe something false. It is teaching people to believe nothing at all.
Now let me say the most uncomfortable thing, because without saying it, everything else I write is worth very little: rumors do not travel in only one direction. In the second quarter of this year, at least eighty-one fact-checks dealt with allegations of crimes against BNP and Jamaat leaders and activists, including members of their student and youth organizations. Nearly half of those claims involved relabeling videos from India or unrelated incidents and presenting them as something they were not. In the final week of June alone, at least five separate fact-checks focused on a single grisly claim—that the bodies of “slain” Bangladesh Chhatra League activists had allegedly been found floating in the Turag River. The claim was proven false, completely and entirely. I work with an organization that has itself been targeted by this kind of misinformation, and that is true. But there is another truth alongside it, and that is the truth that makes me more uncomfortable. After fuel loading began at the first unit of the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant in late April, posts began circulating that falsely attributed credit for constructing the plant—some to Ziaur Rahman, some to Tarique Rahman, some to Dr. Muhammad Yunus, some to Jamaat leaders. In other words, a lie that works in our favor is still a lie, and if we are honest, we have to admit that we are also responsible for spreading it. As someone involved in politics, I know how powerful the temptation is to share allegations against your opponents without verifying them. And I know something even more dangerous: the temptation to share praise for your own leaders without verification can be even stronger, because it feels good. It feels righteous. It feels like loyalty. But in the long run, credibility belongs to the political organization that learns to stop even the lies that favor it. The others merely turn up the volume, and volume is not the same as truth.
Some rumors remain nothing more than words. Others reach a neighbor’s home as fire. After the results of the West Bengal Assembly election were announced on 4 May, the rate of religious misinformation in Bangladesh suddenly jumped—from 2.7% in the first quarter to 9% in the second. Images and videos circulated with claims that mosques were being demolished, that Muslim homes were being destroyed, that a community was under attack. A large portion of that footage turned out to be old material from Nepal, from Yemen, from Indonesia, or from a different part of India entirely. Even a video of a demolition drive in Bangladesh’s own Jashore district was relabeled and passed off as footage of Muslim homes being destroyed across the border. And the flow was not one-way. Misinformation also came from the opposite direction: claims of attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh were illustrated with footage of incidents that had nothing to do with communal violence—an accidental fire in Patuakhali, an attack stemming from a drug-related dispute. I want to be absolutely clear: this article is not claiming that genuine attacks against minorities have not occurred in Bangladesh. Quite the opposite. Real incidents happen, and they demand real justice. But every fabricated claim casts doubt on those real incidents. And the next time genuine news emerges, people may have learned to dismiss that as well. As Md Sayeed Al-Zaman, assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Jahangirnagar University, put it: “Religious misinformation always poses a potential threat to the security of minority communities. Over the past decade, such misinformation has been found at the roots of major communal attacks in both India and Bangladesh.” So before sharing a video circulated in the name of religion, we should at least ask ourselves one question: if this post is false, who will pay the price? The price may be paid by a family in a neighboring village—a family that is also our neighbor. And once their home has been burned to the ground, deleting the post does not bring it back.
Sometimes lies stand right beside genuine grief. On 19 May, eight-year-old Ramisa Akter was raped and murdered in Dhaka’s Pallabi area. The case swiftly moved through the courts, and on 7 June the accused were sentenced to death—one of the fastest major trials in the country’s judicial history, a rare moment of swift accountability that ought to have been celebrated. Yet even this tragedy became raw material for fabricated reactions, fake banners, and AI-generated images. After 19 May, the weekly rate of misinformation related to rape increased nearly fivefold, almost all of it involving footage from other periods or other countries, reshuffled and relabeled and aimed directly at the wounds of a grieving nation. Using the death of a child this way is not merely tasteless; it is a form of violence. Every false claim diverts attention from the actual incident, obscures the achievements of the judicial process, and turns a moment of national grief into a carnival of confusion. There is something else that must be said plainly: for years, we have counseled one another to “look carefully at the picture,” and the usefulness of that advice is now coming to an end. In the second quarter, around eight percent of law-and-order misinformation was generated through AI-created videos or images. In one AI-generated video, words that the prime minister had never spoken were placed in the prime minister’s mouth, so seamless that the eye could no longer detect the forgery. Our eyes are no longer sufficient evidence. What still works is not eyesight; it is habit. It is the habit of asking four questions, two seconds apart: Who is the source? When was it published? Is this the full statement, or has a portion been deliberately taken out of context? And has this story appeared in recognized news media—and if not, why not? These four questions, these two seconds, are perhaps the cheapest and most effective form of civic resistance available in Bangladesh today.
There is also a clear message here for the government, and I want to be careful because it is not a message about imposing restrictions. One of the most revealing patterns of the past six months is the type of false statement that circulated most widely: fabricated quotes attributed to the energy minister about load-shedding in April; fabricated statements attributed to health officials about the measles outbreak; fake news cards carrying invented words attributed to the speaker, the home minister, and the president about political decisions. In every single case, the falsehood occupied exactly the space where an official statement was expected—but was either absent, delayed, or written in language ordinary people could not easily understand. The fastest weapon against rumors is not a lawsuit. The fastest weapon is to publish accurate information more quickly. If, within an hour of an incident, an official statement from the responsible authority appears in a specific, accessible location, there is far less room for a fake news card to fill the information vacuum. Withholding information does not reduce rumors; it increases them, because a vacuum never remains empty—someone will always fill it. We must also preserve a clear distinction between two things that are currently being confused, to everyone’s harm. Criticizing the government and creating false information are not the same. Pointing out policy failures, asking hard questions, and expressing disagreement are not ailments of democracy; they are signs that democracy is functioning. Loving the country does not mean agreeing with everything, and criticizing the government does not mean standing against the state. But putting words into someone’s mouth that they never spoke is not freedom of expression; it is fabrication, and freedom of opinion does not mean freedom to manufacture information. The state must therefore be quick, transparent, and understandable. The media must be verification-driven, professional, and active in preventing the misuse of its name and visual identity. And young people must become a generation that verifies even the information they like—especially the information they like. The task may sound enormous, but in reality, it is small, so small that it seems unbelievable. Do not share one post. Check the date before forwarding a video. When a claim appears in your family group chat, politely ask, “Where did you get this?” One person doing these small things may change nothing. But if thirty million young people do them, the entire information environment of the country can change. Not provocation, but awareness. Not rumors, but truth. Not hatred, but empathy. Not blind support, but informed support. Not division, but solidarity. Because ultimately, no political party pays the price of a rumor, and no government pays it either. The child who misses a vaccination pays the price. The family whose home is burned down pays the price. And the country whose people one day stop believing any news at all pays the price. Let us make sure we never have to pay that price.