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| Available in |
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|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 |
| Headquarters | , India |
| Owner | Pravda Media Foundation [1] |
| Founder(s) |
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| Products | Web portal |
| URL | www |
| Current status | Active |
Alt News is an Indian non-profit fact checking website founded and run by former software engineer Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair. [2] [3] It was launched on 9 February 2017 to combat fake news. Alt News was a signatory partner of the International Fact-Checking Network until April 2020. [4] [9]
Alt News was founded in Ahmedabad [10] by Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer and son of Mukul Sinha, who was a lawyer and the founder-president of Jan Sangharsh Manch. [11] [12] 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 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. [10]
Sinha has allegedaly received threats to his life from fugitive underworld don Ravi Pujari, demanding that he stop producing content. [13] [14]
In July 2022, co-founder Zubair was arrested by Delhi Police for allegedly "hurting religious sentiments". [15] 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. [16] 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. [17]
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 groups that they have been able to infiltrate and also receive content from users who alert them on social media and WhatsApp. [18]
Alt News identified the individuals running the Hindu right-wing website DainikBharat.org. [19] 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 was Guatemalan in origin. [3] [20] [21] [22] According to the BBC, 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. [21] [22] 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 views. [23]
The Alt News team wrote a book titled India Misinformed: The True Story [24] published by HarperCollins which was released in March 2019. [25] The book was "pre-endorsed" by Arundhati Roy. [26] In 2017, Sinha was invited to the Google NewsLab Asia-Pacific Summit to discuss potential solutions to fake news. [3]
Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published; when the text is analyzed by a third party, the process is called external fact-checking.
Kissi Se Na Kehna 1983 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy film directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. It stars Farooq Shaikh, Deepti Naval and Utpal Dutt.
Arnab Ranjan Goswami is an Indian news anchor and journalist. He is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Republic Media Network.
Mukul Sinha was an Indian human rights activist and a lawyer at the Gujarat High Court in Ahemdabad. He was an active trade union leader and a trained physicist. He legally represented the families of the individuals who were killed in Gujarat following the 2002 riots and in Manipur, in which he secured convictions of the politicians and police officers involved. Along with his wife Nirjhari Sinha, he founded and served as the president of Jan Sangharsh Manch, an independent civil rights organization with the aim of addressing issues of labour and workers rights. He was also a vocal critic of erstwhile Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Swarajya is an Indian right-wing monthly print magazine and news portal. The publication reports favourably on the Bharatiya Janata Party and has published misinformation on many occasions.
Sudarshan News is an Indian right-wing news channel. It was founded in 2005 by Suresh Chavhanke, the chairman and editor-in-chief. Chavhanke was a long-term volunteer of the Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), also associating with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of RSS. He asserts that he practices ideology-driven journalism and prefers that the news programs on his channel be viewed as opinionated campaigns.
Republic TV is an Indian right-wing English-language news channel launched in May 2017. It was co-founded by Arnab Goswami and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, before the latter relinquished his stake in May 2019, converting it into an editor controlled company.
Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.
Fake news and similar false information is fostered and spread across India through word of mouth, traditional media and more recently through digital forms of communication such as edited videos, websites, blogs, memes, unverified advertisements and social media propagated rumours. Fake news spread through social media in the country has become a serious problem, with the potential of it resulting in mob violence, as was the case where at least 20 people were killed in 2018 as a result of misinformation circulated on social media.
The StopFake website is a project of Ukrainian media NGO Media Reforms Center. It was founded in March 2014 by Ukrainian professors and students with the stated purpose of refuting Russian propaganda and fake news. It began as a Russian- and English-language fact-checking organization, and has grown to include a TV show broadcast on 30 local channels, a weekly radio show, and a strong social media following.
OpIndia is an Indian far-right news website known for frequently publishing misinformation. Founded in December 2014, the website has published fake news and Islamophobic commentary on numerous occasions. OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers liberal media, and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems to be in opposition to the BJP and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP.
Maridhas Malaichamy, known by his YouTube channel Maridhas Answers, is a right-wing YouTuber and social media influencer from Madurai, Tamil Nadu. He promotes the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) through his social media posts.
Logically is a British multinational technology startup company that specializes in analyzing and fighting disinformation. Logically was founded in 2017 by Lyric Jain and is based in Brighouse, England, with offices in London, Mysore, Bangalore, and Virginia.
Nupur Sharma is an Indian politician. She was the national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) until June 2022. She frequently represented BJP on Indian television debates as an official spokesperson. In June 2022, she was suspended from the party due to her comments about Muhammad and the age of his third wife, Aisha, at the time of their marriage and the consummation of the marriage as well her comments on other central doctrines in the Islamic tradition.
The 2022 Muhammad remarks row began on 27 May 2022, when Nupur Sharma, a spokeswoman of India's ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made remarks about the Islamic prophet Muhammad in reply to remarks on the Hindu god Shiva, on a Times Now debate on the Gyanvapi Mosque dispute, which sparked controversy. Sharma's comment was in reference to an account from Sahih al-Bukhari that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six-years old, and the marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine. The controversy escalated on 1 June, when Naveen Kumar Jindal, the Delhi BJP media chief, made similar remarks on Twitter. By 4 June, the remarks had been widely shared on social media, and were trending among the top 10 hashtags in all the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Turkey. On the contrary, they were defended by right-wing politicians in Europe, like Geert Wilders, who cited Sharma's right to freedom of speech.
Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code lays down the punishment for the deliberate and malicious acts, that are intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs. It is one of the Hate speech laws in India. This law prohibits blasphemy against all religions in India.
Mohammed Zubair is an Indian journalist, fact-checker and the co-founder of Alt News, an Indian non-profit fact-checking website.
Nirjhari Sinha is an Indian human rights activist who, with her husband Mukul Sinha, founded Jan Sangharsh Manch (JSM). She is also director of Pravda Media Foundation, the parent organization of the fact-checking website AltNews run by her son Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair.
Sumaiya Shaikh is a neuroscientist.