How Pratik Sinha has become the most prominent crusader against fake news

Sinha explains regardless of his own political leanings, how Alt News looks at both sides of the political spectrum when fact-checking

Among the descriptors of Pratik Sinha on his Twitter profile are the words “Linux nerd” and “geeky”. Given his detailed replies and slightly twangy speech, it is not surprising to learn that he’s lived across continents as a software engineer. The epithets seem accurate, except he is not your average geek.

The founder of Alt News, arguably India’s best-known fact-checking website, is a leading voice among a few who are busy battling the scourge of fake news. With the last leg of state polls before 2019’s general election, fact-checkers are now bracing for a bigger fight — Sinha appealed on social media last week for public donations to help grow his tiny venture.

“The next general election is just a year away and misinformation is going to be the primary tool to lure voters,” he says, adding, “The hope is that when an Indian citizen stands before the voting booth to cast his or her vote, he or she makes the voting decision based on their living reality, and not on misleading, hateful propaganda.”

The BBC, too, recently issued a clarification denying it had commissioned a survey that predicted a comfortable win for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the imminent Karnataka elections, as claimed by a widely circulated WhatsApp message. In a post-truth age of “alternative facts” and belittlement of traditional media, playing watchdog means there is no respite. “Only when I feel completely burnt out do I take it slow for a day or two,” says Sinha.

Alt News, which was started in February 2017, has four salaried employees, besides two anonymous individuals who volunteer part-time. They function out of Sinha’s home in Ahmedabad, in a room, which served as the office of his father Mukul Sinha, a lawyer-physicist, and rights activist who fought for the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots.

A trio of editorial employees monitors content to identify fake news (one of them also runs the Facebook page titled “Unofficial Subramanian Swamy”). They receive mails, are alerted to specious material on WhatsApp, and are tagged on Twitter and Facebook, which Sinha terms “passive monitoring”. They use a Facebook tool to monitor a list of pages on the social network. “Based on how viral something is, its potential for sparking communal tension or involvement of senior politicians like Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, we decide which to select.”

He reckons that nearly 95 per cent of fake news websites veer right wing. Increasingly, they tend to present information as opinion rather than reportage and in the process become less effective, says Sinha. Alt News is careful to run a paragraph in every article that explains how the fake news was researched. “Why should anybody consider Alt News? Only if we tell people ‘this is how we spotted fake news and how you can too’,” he says.

After graduating in Bengaluru in 2003, Sinha worked as a software engineer in the city, the US and Vietnam and as a freelancer in Ahmedabad. After returning home in 2013, he suggested that the wealth of documents that were in his parents’ possession — his father was representing victims in encounter cases — could be put online. That is how he created Truth of Gujarat, a website that was active for a couple of years.

After his father succumbed to cancer in May 2014, his mother, a retired physicist with the Physical Research Laboratory and an activist who leads the rights organisation Jan Sangharsh Manch, has continued the fight. She was among a group of protesters that included legislator Jignesh Mevani who lent support to a protracted and ultimately successful strike by Ahmedabad’s sanitation workers who sought minimum wages in 2016. Pratik Sinha, who was documenting the protest, was disillusioned by his professional life at the time. “My work (as software engineer) was never going to reach them. So the idea was to use my skills and develop something which had some bearing on society.”

His mother is a director of Alt News and handles administrative work. “Mukul and I were always taking up the cause of people and had friends from all sections. I used to carry Pratik everywhere, even if we went on an agitation, because we had no babysitter. Growing up in such an environment must have influenced him,” she says. Pratik agrees. “Alt News is a byproduct of the ideology I have grown up with and the skills I developed as a professional.”

Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the International Fact Checking Network at the Florida-based Poynter Institute, says fact-checking websites play a crucial role in targeting the most viral and pernicious falsehoods. But, he adds, an equally important role is to model a behaviour, to spread the fact-checking method so that readers can in turn become more discerning and learn skills they can adopt when viewing questionable content. According to him, “Smartphones, like the Internet — but also newspapers and books before it — are a medium that can be used for good purposes and bad. The same instrument that surfaces garbage hoaxes about celebrities and hate speech about ethnic minorities can be used to reverse-search an image, consult an official database and read a fact-checking website.”

Pankaj Jain, founder of the website SMHoaxSlayer, which specialises in quick fact-checking on social media, argues that mainstream media should work on combating fake news seriously since their outlets enjoy greater reach. “I believe regional newspapers and channels should take this up seriously as the people being affected most are only on WhatsApp and mostly read and watch regional news.”

Madhu Trehan, co-founder of media critique platform Newslaundry, says there hasn’t been a time when the media has been more polarised. She also blames an “echo chamber mentality” where people only read or watch news that they agree with, leading to an unthinking and ill-informed society. “A lot of fake news is coming from the mouths of politicians. And that is now being checked, corrected and pointed out,” adding that the strong counter to fake news from the likes of Sinha and Jain is akin to a doctor’s response.

Sinha too emphasises that Indian society is split by political polarisation. “Otherwise, how do you explain so many people trying to justify what happened in Kathua?” he says, referring to how a section of right-wing supporters defended the accused in the recent rape and murder of a minor in Jammu.

In his view, a majority of fake news websites and pages are run by youngsters. In search of a quick buck, they sell off a Facebook page once it hits a million “likes”. “More often than not they adhere to right-wing ideologies, but the financial factor cannot be discounted,” he adds.

How can fact-checkers help restore sanity in such a scenario? Sinha claims that, regardless of his own political leanings, Alt News looks at both sides of the political spectrum when fact-checking. “It’s simple. We show that this is the fact and it doesn’t match up to the truth. We leave it at that.”

He continues to cop a lot of hatred online, he admits. It isn’t hard to guess which end of the ideological spectrum it flows from.