Absolutely. It's distressing. Sometimes I feel that Indians are the most gullible people out there right now in the world. This includes many of the Indian friends I have in the US, based on all the whatsapp groups I am on. More than 90% of them believe all the fake news that comes from India on whatsapp. I have a simple rule that if the whatsapp message says, "pass it on to others" that it is fake with more than a 95% probability, as we can see from a simple google search - which I often do and nis never done by any of my friends. But I routinely get at least 10 to 15 of those fake whatsapp "tell everybody" messages a day with some Indian context or other. When I see that the gullibility is just the same with my Indian friends and family both in India and in the US (most of them well-educated engineers, doctors, academicians, businessmen etc), I get very alarmed. With whatsapp having such influence on Indians, I see a serious problem developing.
If we feel that what happened with the US elections and media manipulations is causing hell right now, let us wait till we see something happening in the Indian context. I don't know if there is an FBI-type organization that is actually monitoring any seriously-orchestrated campaign (like the US FBI did since 2015, though they and the men at the top didn't realize the repercussions and were late and messy/wrong in their actions about it). There is probably some deliberately fake (though actually mostly exaggerated) news campaigns from the Hindutva side right now, but they don't appear to be well-orchestrated to me, and they have been doing it for a couple of decades anyway. I have personally noticed nothing else that seems to have any deep plans behind it. But is it all just isolated mischief-makers?.... What if a serious dark-web is actually developing? If some China or Pakistan or somebody really starts a Russian-style long-range plan with whatsapp, we are in for some serious trouble. I hardly see much recognition of the gravity of this problem in India, though. I have recently been in India multiple times and the fake-news-driven whatsapp world-view is firmly in place among Indians right now on almost everything - mostly unimportant things, but some potentially important things too, with twisted facts and stories on medical matters, politics, entertainment, sports, economy, history... I am not seeing patterns myself, but I am deeply alarmed at the potential for some deep-enough nefarious plans that could seriously affect the nation in some ways that we are not foreseeing.
The effect of whatsapp in the national reaction to Sunil Chhetri within a mere 2 days during a football tournament shocked me a few weeks ago. That was a positive thing, and there was really no fake news involved, but what if the nation reacts like that on something very very negative and fake later?