Parties Invested in Misinformation: Alt News’ Pratik Sinha Decodes

The Quint spoke to Pratik Sinha, to understand how Alt News fought against fake news phenomenon in the elections.

(Photo: Rahul Nair/The Quint)

Video Producer: Anubhav Sinha

Video Editor: Mohammad Irshad Alam

This election season, we've seen a lot of misinformation floating around the internet.

The Quint spoke to Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, to understand how they fought this phenomenon.

While there weren't many 'dangerous' stories, misinformation was endorsed as genuine information to a large extent by ministers and candidates themselves, said Sinha.

And sometimes, they were targeted at one particular person. "One of the most targeted leader – and that can be seen in electorally too – is Mamata Banerjee. When she ends a speech, she recites slogans from different religions. So, in a video, only slogan of Islam was kept, rest all were clipped," he said, citing an example.

And sometimes the deluge was so much, that despite publishing almost seven stories a day, it would be impossible to catch up with the amount of misinformation, Sinha said.

“Everyday there was another clipped video or another morphed picture and it was being done in a very organised manner to suggest that they knew the narratives can be set. It is very clear to my mind that political parties have completely realised these fault lines in the Indian democracy where people can be misled using misinformation.”

So how does he rate Indian fact-checkers as having fared this election season?

“I think overall the fact-checkers have done well... But I don’t think they have been as extensive as what Altnews and Boomlive have done. The advantage that legacy media has is that they already have an audience that is there, especially in case of print," he said.