Alt News is an Indian non-profit fact checking website founded and run by former software engineer Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair. It was launched on 9 February 2017 to combat

fake news Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information (misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and hoaxes) claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person ...

. Alt News was a signatory partner of the

International Fact-Checking Network The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the ''Tampa Bay Times'' newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Netwo ...

until April 2020.

History

Alt News was founded in

Ahmedabad Ahmedabad ( ), also spelled Amdavad (), is the most populous city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is the administrative headquarters of the Ahmedabad district and the seat of the Gujarat High Court. Ahmedabad's population of 5,570,585 ...

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 meaning "broken/scattered") is a term used for untouchables and outcasts, who represented the lowest stratum of the castes in the Indian subcontinent. They are also called Harijans. Dalits were excluded from the fourfold var ...

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. Sinha has allegedly received threats to his life from fugitive underworld don Ravi Pujari, 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. Delhi Police falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. In 2024, the sanctioned strength of Delhi Police w ...

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 () 1983 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy film directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. It stars Farooq Shaikh, Deepti Naval and Utpal Dutt. Synopsis Kailash Pati, a very devotional widower, lives a retired life spending time complaining about ...

'' 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 TweetDeck, officially X Pro since 2023, is a paid proprietary social media dashboard for management of Twitter (officially X) accounts. Originally an independent app, TweetDeck was subsequently acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into Twitte ...

, 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 (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make vo ...

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 Hindus (; ; also known as Sanātanīs) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism, also known by its endonym Sanātana Dharma. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pp. 35–37 Historically, the term has also be ...

right-wing website DainikBharat.org. 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

Guatemala Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically b ...

n in origin. According to the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

, 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 is 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 position b ...

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

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

which was released in March 2019. The book was "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. ...

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

Other key people

Sumaiya Shaikh

Sumaiya Shaikh is a

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist specializing in neuroscience that deals with the anatomy and function of neurons, Biological neural network, neural circuits, and glia, and their Behavior, behavioral, biological, and psycholo ...

who co-founded Alt News in her role as the science editor. Her work has focused on debunking misinformation related to medicine. She wrote a book titled ''India Misinformed: The True Story'' with Pratik Sinha of Alt News. It was published by

Harper Collins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the " Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. HarperCollins is ...

in 2019. Shaikh has frequently highlighted misinformation related to

Ayurveda Ayurveda (; ) is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. It is heavily practised throughout India and Nepal, where as much as 80% of the population report using ayurveda. The theory and practice of ayur ...

, including when treatments have been promoted without scientific data. Shaikh is the founding director of a

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

-based organization called ViolEND. The organization aims to rehabilitate extremists who per Shaikh have been shown by research to have an urge to be violent and prefer the

dopamine Dopamine (DA, a contraction of 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) is a neuromodulatory molecule that plays several important roles in cells. It is an organic chemical of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families. It is an amine synthesized ...

-driven high from violence over other types of highs such as from

alcohol Alcohol may refer to: Common uses * Alcohol (chemistry), a class of compounds * Ethanol, one of several alcohols, commonly known as alcohol in everyday life ** Alcohol (drug), intoxicant found in alcoholic beverages ** Alcoholic beverage, an alco ...

drugs A drug is any chemical substance other than a nutrient or an essential dietary ingredient, which, when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect. Consumption of drugs can be via inhalation, injection, smoking, ingestio ...

References

External links

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