1. The Broken Promise of the Connected World
There was a time, not so long ago, when the internet felt like a miracle. It promised us a global village, a boundless library, and a town square where every voice could be heard. We imagined a world where distance would no longer silence us, where a farmer in Maharashtra could learn from a scientist in Bengaluru, and where a grandmother could send a voice note to her grandson across the ocean. That promise still flickers somewhere beneath the noise, but today it is often buried under an avalanche of forwarded messages, half-truths, and outright lies. In India, a rumour can now travel from one phone to a million screens faster than a fact-checker can type a single sentence. And with the arrival of artificial intelligence, even the most careful reader can be fooled by a fabricated video or a voice clone that sounds exactly like a trusted friend. Saadia Azim’s book, Forwarded as Received, walks straight into this chaos. She does not shout or panic. Instead, she sits with the problem, turns it over in her hands, and asks a question that feels both simple and impossible: how did we get here, and how do we find our way out? Her answer is not censorship, not control, not the heavy hand of the state. It is something far more difficult and far more human. It is the slow, patient work of rebuilding trust. She reminds us that the original internet was meant to be a space of dignity, where people could speak and listen without fear. But somewhere along the way, that space became a battlefield. The book is not just a study of misinformation; it is a mirror held up to our own habits, our own laziness, our own willingness to hit forward without a second thought. And the first step, she suggests, is to look at that mirror and not flinch.
2. When a Rumour Becomes a Noose
The most haunting pages of Forwarded as Received are not about algorithms or AI. They are about bodies. They are about ordinary people whose lives were torn apart because someone, somewhere, decided to share a message without checking it. Azim takes us back to the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh in 2015, a name that has become a grim symbol of what happens when ancient hatred meets modern technology. A rumour about beef, a mob, a night of violence, and a man was dead. But Azim does not stop at the event itself. She traces the invisible threads that led to that moment: the forwarded messages, the group chats, the half-heard whispers that turned suspicion into certainty. She uses the phrase “ancient brutality has become a viral impulse” to describe what happened, and the words stay with you long after you close the book. What is even more chilling is her observation that there is a complete absence of collective remorse. When a lie kills, who apologises? The person who started the rumour? The person who forwarded it? The platform that amplified it? No one does. The mob disperses, the news cycle moves on, and another family is left to bury their dead. Azim argues that this is not just a social problem; it is a policy problem. It demands more than outrage. It demands systems of accountability. But she also shows us that misinformation does not only strike before a crime. It also runs rampant afterwards, twisting the story, protecting the guilty, and demonising the victim. Social media platforms, she notes, are not neutral conduits. They are engines of outrage, designed to prioritise content that makes us angry, because anger keeps us scrolling. In this way, the book forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: we are not just passive receivers of misinformation. We are active participants in a cycle of violence, whether we realise it or not.
3. The Psychology of the Forward Button
Why do we share things? It is a question that seems too simple to matter, but Azim treats it with the seriousness it deserves. She digs into the psychology of the person who forwards a message, and what she finds is both familiar and unsettling. Most of us do not forward a piece of content because we have verified it. We forward it because it makes us feel something. It makes us feel worried, or righteous, or scared, or important. We tell ourselves that we are doing our civic duty, warning our family, alerting our friends. But the act of forwarding, especially when it is done with the phrase “forwarded as received,” becomes a strange kind of escape hatch. It absolves us of responsibility. We are not claiming the information is true; we are just passing it along. But in practice, that distinction means nothing. A lie that is forwarded is still a lie that spreads. A rumour that is shared is still a rumour that grows. Azim shows us that this behaviour is not born of malice. Most people are not trying to destroy lives. They are trying to protect their loved ones, or to feel connected, or to participate in a conversation that feels bigger than themselves. But good intentions do not stop a bullet, and they do not bring back the dead. The book calls for a more intentional approach to consuming and engaging with news. It asks us to pause, to breathe, to check the source before we share. It asks us to be willing to be the person who says, “I don’t know if this is true,” instead of the person who says, “I just sent it because I thought you should see it.” This is not a glamorous solution. It is not a new app or a clever algorithm. It is the unglamorous, difficult work of being a responsible human being in a world that rewards speed over accuracy.
4. The Race Against the Lie
One of the most frustrating realities of misinformation is that the truth always seems to arrive late. By the time a fact-checker has debunked a claim, the claim has already been seen by millions of people. Azim points out this painful asymmetry again and again: the lie travels at the speed of light, while the correction crawls at the speed of bureaucracy. To address this, she proposes something called “prebunking.” The idea is simple, though the execution is hard. Instead of waiting for a lie to spread and then trying to chase it down, we should warn people in advance about the kinds of misinformation that are likely to appear. We should build resilience, not just response. Think of it like a vaccine. A vaccine does not wait until you are sick to protect you; it prepares your body to fight the disease before it arrives. Prebunking does the same for our minds. It helps us recognise the patterns of misinformation, the emotional triggers, the suspicious sources, so that when a lie appears, we are not caught off guard. But Azim does not stop at individual responsibility. She also calls on social media platforms and lawmakers to step up. She argues that platforms need robust feedback mechanisms, and that there must be human intervention to weed out posts that target individuals, communities, religions, and castes. In a country as diverse as India, this is not just a technical issue. It is a matter of life and death. When a false story is allowed to target a particular community, it does not just hurt feelings; it can incite violence. Azim is careful to say that the answer is not censorship. She is not asking for the state to decide what is true. She is asking for a framework of checks and balances, a system that allows for mistakes and corrections, a digital ecosystem where dignity is the rule, not the exception.
5. A Book That Demands Patience
It would be dishonest to say that Forwarded as Received is an easy read. Azim’s book has been praised for its thoroughness, but that thoroughness comes at a cost. The book tends to become repetitive, circling back to the same problems and the same solutions after every few chapters. At times, it reads less like a work of narrative non-fiction and more like a textbook, a dense manual for understanding misinformation. For a student or a researcher, this repetition might be useful. It reinforces key ideas and ensures that the lessons stick. But for a casual reader, someone who picked up the book because they wanted to understand the world a little better, the constant reiteration can feel exhausting. There were moments when I found myself wishing that Azim would trust her reader a little more, that she would let a point land and move on, rather than hammering it home again and again. The book also struggles with its own scope. After a while, the extensive detailing of crimes and incidents begins to feel less like storytelling and more like documentation. It is as if the author is determined to make sure that no event is left out, even if that means sacrificing the narrative flow. The result is a book that is undeniably important, but not always enjoyable. It demands patience. It demands a willingness to sit with discomfort and repetition. And yet, perhaps that is the point. Misinformation is not a simple problem, and it does not deserve a simple solution. A book that forces us to slow down, to reread, to think, might be exactly what we need in a world that moves too fast.
6. A Map for the Road Ahead
Despite its flaws, Forwarded as Received is an essential addition to the growing library of books about how India lives online. It joins a conversation that is urgent and necessary, a conversation about who we are when no one is watching, and who we become when we are all watching together. Azim does not offer easy answers, but she does offer a direction. She reminds us that the internet was not built to destroy us. It was built to connect us. And it can still do that, if we are willing to fight for it. The book is a mirror, but it is also a map. It shows us the roads that led us here, and it points toward the paths that might lead us out. It calls on citizens to be more thoughtful, on journalists to be more rigorous, on policymakers to be more courageous, and on platforms to be more responsible. But above all, it calls on us to remember our own humanity. Every time we pause before forwarding, every time we check a source, every time we choose to have a difficult conversation instead of a heated argument, we are rebuilding trust. We are reclaiming our right to truth. We are creating digital spaces where dignity is possible. The road ahead is long, and the work is slow. But as Azim reminds us, the way forward will not come through censorship or control. It will come through the small, ordinary, extraordinary choices we make every day. It will come through us.