By: The Obnews Editorial Team
Spend enough time scrolling through social media outside India and you can encounter a strange version of the country. India becomes an endless montage of overflowing garbage, chaotic roads, open drains, slums, cows in traffic, overcrowded trains and confrontational street encounters. These scenes are not necessarily fabricated. India has serious problems with sanitation, waste management, congestion, pollution, poverty and inequality. The distortion comes from something more subtle: the most shocking parts of a country are increasingly being presented as though they are the most representative parts of it.
That distinction matters. A camera can record something completely real while still creating a misleading picture of the whole. India contains enormous extremes. A modern airport can sit within driving distance of an informal settlement. A technology worker can pay for lunch using a QR code while another family in the same state struggles with basic sanitation. A new expressway can coexist with a badly maintained local road. None of those images cancels out the others. The problem begins when social media repeatedly selects one end of that spectrum and viewers begin mistaking the selection for a representative sample.
The Algorithm Does Not Sample a Country
There is a powerful economic reason for this. Social media does not reward creators for providing statistically representative portraits of countries. It rewards attention.
Research backs up the broader principle. A 2023 study published in Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 headline variations that generated roughly 5.7 million clicks from more than 370 million impressions. Researchers found that negative language increased news consumption, with each additional negative word in an average length headline increasing click through rates by approximately 2.3%. Another study published in Scientific Reports in 2024 examined more than 95,000 news articles and hundreds of millions of social media posts and found that users were 1.91 times more likely to share links to negative news articles.
That does not prove that every video showing poverty in India is deliberately manipulative. It does explain the incentive structure surrounding the content. A perfectly ordinary residential neighbourhood in Pune, Chandigarh, Hyderabad or Bengaluru may be far more representative of how millions of Indians actually live, but there may be little reason for someone to watch it for 45 seconds. A filthy alley, dangerous traffic manoeuvre, shocking public argument or severely deprived settlement immediately creates emotion, surprise and comments.
Normality is difficult to make viral.
As a result, a creator arriving in Delhi can theoretically spend days filming offices, restaurants, universities, shopping centres, Metro stations, apartment developments and ordinary neighbourhoods and receive comparatively modest engagement. A few minutes of footage from an exceptionally crowded or deprived pocket can create the impression of having discovered the “real India.” Once one style of video succeeds, other creators have an incentive to imitate it. The algorithm does not need to possess an anti India bias for the outcome to become distorted. It simply needs to continuously reward whatever keeps people watching.
The Older Image of Poverty Never Completely Disappeared
There is also a much older visual vocabulary surrounding India. For decades, international documentaries, charity campaigns, photography, films and travel coverage frequently relied on images of slums, rural deprivation, crowded streets and poverty to communicate the country quickly to foreign audiences. Critics have often described the most exploitative version of this practice as “poverty porn,” meaning the repeated use of human deprivation primarily because it produces an emotional reaction.
The problem is not that poverty should be hidden. Serious journalism should document deprivation, failing infrastructure and government shortcomings. India benefits from scrutiny just as every other country does. The problem comes when poverty becomes the default visual shorthand for a country of more than a billion people, including hundreds of millions of urban residents, a vast middle class, enormous industrial centres, global technology companies and dramatically different living conditions from one district to another.
Increasingly, synthetic media creates another complication. India has already experienced a sharp increase in AI generated misinformation. Indian fact checker BOOM reported that 20.5% of the material it debunked in 2025 was AI generated, up from 8.35% a year earlier. Recent Indian fact checks have also documented viral photographs and videos in which crowds, locations or events were artificially created or altered. That does not mean every shocking image should be dismissed as AI, but viewers can no longer assume that an extraordinary looking clip is genuine simply because it appears in a social media feed.
India’s Problems Are Real, but the Numbers Matter
Perhaps the clearest example is poverty. India remains a country with enormous economic inequality and millions of vulnerable households. But the scale of extreme poverty has changed dramatically.
The World Bank’s updated estimates show extreme poverty, using a comparable methodology, declining from 16.2% of the population in 2011 to 2012 to approximately 2.3% in 2022 to 2023. Under the World Bank’s newer $3 per person per day international extreme poverty line, the estimate for 2022 to 2023 is 5.3%. The broader lower middle income poverty line produces a much higher number, illustrating why arguments about whether India has “ended poverty” depend heavily on where the threshold is drawn. What cannot reasonably be disputed is that extreme deprivation has fallen substantially over the past decade.
Sanitation presents a similar story. Images of open defecation became one of the most persistent international stereotypes associated with India because the problem was once extraordinarily widespread. Major toilet construction and sanitation programs changed that picture considerably. WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme data reported that about 11% of India’s population was still practising open defecation in 2022, while 78% had access to at least basic sanitation and approximately 52% used safely managed sanitation services. Eleven percent of a population as large as India’s is still an enormous public health problem, and regional disparities remain significant. But it is very different from presenting open defecation as the routine experience of most Indians.
Slums provide another example of the importance of scale. India unquestionably has major informal settlements, including some internationally famous ones, and inadequate housing remains a serious urban challenge. Yet even the last comprehensive national Census data showed slum residents representing a minority of the urban population rather than the norm for the country. The 2011 Census recorded roughly 65.5 million people living in slums, about 17.4% of the urban population at that time. Those figures are now old and should not be treated as a current estimate, but they demonstrate why footage taken from one settlement cannot reasonably stand in for the living conditions of an entire nation.
Indians Produce Plenty of the Negative Content Too
It would also be misleading to frame this simply as foreigners portraying India badly.
Some of the harshest footage of Indian cities is uploaded by Indians themselves. Residents routinely post videos of potholes, illegal dumping, flooding, reckless driving, poor civic behaviour, pollution and neglected public infrastructure. These videos can perform an important accountability function. A resident showing an overflowing drain or garbage dump is not damaging India by documenting it. In many cases, public pressure is precisely what forces authorities to respond.
This means there are really two different questions. Is the problem shown in a particular video real? And is the video representative of India as a whole?
The answer can easily be yes to the first and no to the second.
India still faces major problems that should not be minimized. Waste collection remains inconsistent across many municipalities. Open drains remain common in some neighbourhoods. Northern India experiences severe seasonal air pollution. Traffic enforcement and road discipline vary enormously. Women’s safety remains a significant concern. Development between states and between wealthy and poor districts can look like two different countries. Pointing to India’s metros, digital payments, airports and technology sector cannot erase these failures.
But neither should those failures erase everything else.
A Country of 1.4 Billion People Can Produce Endless Examples of Almost Anything
India’s enormous population creates another statistical illusion. In a country with more than 1.4 billion people, even something affecting a relatively small percentage of residents can involve tens of millions of human beings. There can therefore be an almost limitless supply of authentic photographs and videos showing poverty, bad infrastructure, bizarre incidents, overcrowding or unsanitary conditions.
A creator does not need to fake anything. There are enough real examples available.
That is precisely why individual viral clips are such a poor way to understand the country. Someone could produce thousands of videos showing wealthy Indians and still fail to demonstrate that the average Indian is wealthy. Someone could produce thousands showing extreme deprivation and still fail to demonstrate that extreme deprivation describes the average household. With a population larger than that of entire continents, India’s extremes are themselves enormous.
The same principle applies in the opposite direction. Videos of GIFT City, luxury towers in Mumbai, Bengaluru technology campuses, spotless airports, modern expressways or expensive shopping centres can also create a distorted picture if they are presented as the universal Indian experience. Development showcase videos and poverty videos are mirror images of the same mistake: selecting one extreme and calling it the country.
The Real India Is the Part Between the Viral Clips
The more accurate picture is simultaneously less flattering and more impressive than either side of the social media argument suggests.
India has undergone enormous economic, technological and infrastructure development while retaining major gaps in sanitation, housing, municipal management and income. It contains some of the world’s most advanced digital infrastructure alongside places where basic public services remain inadequate. It has highly developed urban districts and deeply deprived communities. It has cities transformed by metros and highways while other neighbourhoods continue struggling with drainage, garbage and congestion.
All of these things can be true at once.
The phrase that the “worst one percent” of India dominates social media should therefore be understood as a metaphor rather than a statistical measurement. Nobody has established that exactly one percent of the country generates these images. The deeper point is about selection bias. The extremes are easier to notice, easier to film, easier to react to and, according to research on digital behaviour, often easier to distribute.
When millions of ordinary homes, commutes, offices, schools, markets and neighbourhoods generate almost no viral content while one shocking street corner generates ten million views, the internet begins to confuse visibility with prevalence.
India should not be protected from criticism, and its remaining poverty, sanitation failures, pollution, inequality and civic problems should not be concealed. But a country should also not be understood through an algorithmically selected highlight reel of its worst moments.
The slum is real. The luxury tower is real. The broken road is real. The new Metro is real. The garbage dump is real. The technology park beside it is real.
India is all of them. The algorithm simply has a preference for showing you whichever one makes you stop scrolling.