“The prime minister of India says beggars in India have gone hi-tech and give you digital machines to swipe your card, for alms,” said my wife. “Is that true?”

My wife now frequently asks me whether any news she reads is true or fake, after reading that bots or robots have been unleashed on the internet that write fake news for the unsuspecting populace.

“The PM was commenting on a video of a beggar. It was unfortunately, staged,” I said. “These people were filming a beggar knocking on their car window, asking for money. The passenger says she has no change, rummages in her purse and says sorry. But the beggar says not to worry and pulls a digital cash machine from his dirty satchel, that makes the woman passenger and the man filming it from the driver seat, laugh out loud,” I said.

“Why I think it is fake and staged is why was the man taking a video of the beggar before he sprang a surprise on them? Nobody films a beggar,” I said.

“This was to show how India is going cashless and how it will help boost the economy, now that the demonetisation move will not achieve the desired result of getting rid of unaccounted money,” I said.

“You sound like Kejriwal,” said my wife. (Arvind Kejriwal is the chief minister of New Delhi and is a politician from a different political camp who is at loggerheads with the prime minister over policy).

“It says here that Trump plans to select a County Sheriff as his chief of Homeland Security, and that man wants to suspend the constitutional rights of up to a million people, and hold them indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. That’s fake news, right?” asked my wife.

“What? Show me,” I said.

My wife handed me the tablet.

“That, I am afraid, is real news,” I said.

“How can you tell if news is real or fake?” she asked.

“Here, read this,” I said, showing her a report that said Trump is planning to build the wall, using actual Mexicans.

“Also, see this headline, ‘Vermont deer trying to flee to Canada after election results, captured,’ that’s not fake news, but spoof,” I said.

There’s a newspaper called Onion that just prints spoof articles and unfortunately they seem so authentic that even the China People’s Daily got fooled.

Onion had declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man alive and the Chinese fell for it and quoted the story about how Kim’s “air of power masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side,” and about his “impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle.”

Faking News, a website that, well, documents fake news, wrote recently that the Indian finance minister was cheesed off with the press for printing the jokes about demonetisation that are rampant on WhatsApp.

“The media needs to act responsibly,” it said, quoting the minister, who promised to take action against the media. “Most of the jokes are silly and now are a bigger problem than black [unaccounted] money itself,” the minister is supposed to have said.

FactCheck.org says that bogus stories that are unresearched, error-filled and downright misleading are reaching more people even more rapidly than ever before through social media. As more and more people forward the fake news, people think it is actually news, when it is fiction, the website says.

Even US President Barack Obama has said that it was fake news that helped Trump come to office and ruined Hillary Clinton’s chances at reaching the White House.

Facebook and news agencies such as Reuters are fighting back with their algorithms to stop fake news, the writers of which make more money than real journalists.

Science News an online magazine points out that if you repeat a lie often enough, it starts to feel like the truth.