Alt News is an Indian non-profit fact checking website founded and run by former software engineer Pratik Sinha and

Mohammed Zubair Mohammad Zubair may refer to: * Muhammad Zubair Umar also known as Mohammad Zubair, Pakistani politician * Mohammad Zubair Khan, Pakistani economist * Mohammad Zubair (Pakistani cricketer), Rawalpindi cricketer * Muhammad Zubair (field hockey) ...

. It was launched on 9 February 2017 to combat

fake news Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)"Fake news in realit ...

. In October 2022 Harsh Mander (author, activist and director of the Center for Equity Studies in New Delhi), along with the campaign he launched in 2017, Karwan-e-Mohabbat ("Caravan of Love"), a campaign supporting and showing solidarity with the victims of hate crimes, along with

and Pratik Sinha have been nominated in the

Henrik Urdal's Henrik is a male given name of Germanic origin, primarily used in Scandinavia, Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. In Poland, the name is spelt Henryk (given name), Henryk but pronounced similarly. Equivalents in other languages are Henry (given name), ...

(

Peace Research Institute Oslo The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO; no, Institutt for fredsforskning) is a private research institution in peace and conflict studies, based in Oslo, Norway, with around 100 employees. It was founded in 1959 by a group of Norwegian researcher ...

Director) list of "worthy candidates"/"worthy recipients" for 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. A note on the official website of

read, "Other worthy candidates for a prize focused on combating religious extremism and intolerance in India are Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha, the co-founders of Alt News, a fact-checking site making significant contributions to debunking misinformation aimed at vilifying Muslims in India". Alt News was a signatory partner of the International Fact-Checking Network until April 2020.

History

Alt News was founded in Ahmedabad by Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer and son of Mukul Sinha, who was a lawyer and the founder-president of Jan Sangharsh Manch. Pratik Sinha became interested in exposing fake news when he began working with his activist parents in India. He had followed the rise of fake news as early as 2013 but was moved to start the website after realizing the impact of social media in 2016, when four

Dalit Dalit (from sa, दलित, dalita meaning "broken/scattered"), also previously known as untouchable, is the lowest stratum of the castes in India. Dalits were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and were seen as forming a ...

boys were flogged for skinning a dead cow in Una, Gujarat. He quit freelancing as a software engineer in 2016 and founded Alt News the next year. Since launching the website, Sinha has received threats to his life, demanding that he stop producing content. In July 2022, co-founder Zubair was arrested by

Delhi Police The Delhi Police (DP) is the law enforcement agency for the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). Delhi Police comes under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India. In 2015, sanctioned strength of Delhi ...

for allegedly "hurting religious sentiments". The charges under IPC section 295A and section 67 of the IT Act were pressed for a satirical tweet he made in 2018, in which he shared an unedited screenshot from a 1983 Indian comedy film '' Kissi Se Na Kehna'' by

Hrishikesh Mukherjee Hrishikesh Mukherjee (30 September 1922 – 27 August 2006) was an Indian film director, editor and writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of Indian cinema. Popularly known as ''Hrishi-da'', he directed 42 films during his car ...

. The tweet was complained to be disregarding of Hindu sentiments by an anonymous Twitter user. Journalist bodies, human rights organizations, and the political opposition perceived the arrest as a revenge against his role in the 2022 BJP Muhammad remarks controversy and Alt News' work of fighting disinformation in the society, while noting of diminishing press freedom in Modi's India.

Process

Alt News works by monitoring misinformation, primarily identifying that are sufficiently viral. They use CrowdTangle, a Facebook tool that publishers use to track how content spreads across the internet, for monitoring Facebook pages that have put out misinformation at some point in the past and are on either side of the ideological spectrum. They use TweetDeck, a Twitter management tool to similarly monitor content on Twitter posted by people who have been known to tweet misinformation frequently. They also monitor multiple

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows user ...

groups that they have been able to infiltrate and also receive content from users who alert them on social media and

Popular work

Alt News identified the individuals running the Hindu right-wing website DainikBharat.org. Sinha demonstrated that a video purportedly of a Hindu man being lynched by Muslims in

Bihar Bihar (; ) is a state in eastern India. It is the 2nd largest state by population in 2019, 12th largest by area of , and 14th largest by GDP in 2021. Bihar borders Uttar Pradesh to its west, Nepal to the north, the northern part of West ...

was in fact from

Bangladesh Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million pe ...

. He also exposed Delhi based lawyer Prashant Patel who falsely compiled many fake news on his Twitter account. He also showed that a video allegedly depicting a Marwari girl married to a Muslim man being burnt to death for not wearing a

burqah A burqa or a burka, or , and ur, , it is also transliterated as burkha, bourkha, burqua or burqu' or borgha' and is pronounced natively . It is generally pronounced in the local variety of Arabic or variety of Persian, which varies. Exampl ...

was Guatemalan in origin. According to the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

, a report by Alt News in June 2017 demonstrating that the Indian Home Ministry had used a picture of the Spanish-Moroccan border to claim it had installed floodlights on India's borders led to the ministry facing online mockery. Sinha has compiled a list of more than 40 of what he describes as fake news sources, most of which he says support

right wing Right-wing politics describes the range of Ideology#Political ideologies, political ideologies that view certain social orders and Social stratification, hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this pos ...

views. The Alt News team has written a book titled "''India Misinformed: The True Story''" published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...

which was released in March 2019. The book has been "pre-endorsed" by

Arundhati Roy Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel ''The God of Small Things'' (1997), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. S ...

. In 2017, Sinha was invited to the Google NewsLab Asia-Pacific Summit to discuss potential solutions to

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://www.altnews.in Fact-checking websites Indian news websites Internet properties established in 2017