Alt News was founded in Ahmedabad by Pratik Sinha, a former Software Engineer and son of Mukul Sinha, who was a trained physicist, lawyer and human rights activist and the founder and 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 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. In 2017, Pratik Sinha was invited to the Google NewsLab Asia-Pacific Summit to discuss potential solutions to fake news. Since launching the website, he has received threats to his life, demanding that he stop producing content.
Process
Alt News works by monitoring misinformation. 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. Content that has been identified to have misinformation and that are sufficiently viral will be flagged for a fact-check. Virality is an important criterion. If there is misinformation that is not being circulated widely, Alt News prefers to not write about it because it might inadvertently trigger people to start circulating it.
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 was in fact from Bangladesh. 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. 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. 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. The Alt News team has written a book titled "India Misinformed: The True Story" published by HarperCollins which was released in March 2019. The book has been "pre-endorsed" by Arundhati Roy.
