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Alt News is India's best-known independent fact-checking website, a non-profit digital outlet that has spent nearly a decade debunking misinformation circulating on Indian social media. Founded on 9 February 2017 in Ahmedabad by former software engineer Pratik Sinha and his co-founder Mohammed Zubair, Alt News was created to combat the flood of fake news — doctored images, misattributed videos, fabricated quotes and manufactured communal provocations — unleashed by the cheap-smartphone and data boom. Operated by the Pravda Media Foundation and published in English and Hindi, it combines forensic digital investigation with traditional reporting, documenting its debunks with archived links, reverse-image searches and primary-source verification. It was a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network until April 2020, and its work has repeatedly forced corrections, police action and national debate. Its founders have paid a price for the work: Sinha has faced threats to his life, and Zubair was arrested in June 2022 in a case that drew international attention to press freedom in India.
Alt News was launched on 9 February 2017, at a moment when India's information ecosystem was undergoing a violent transformation. The arrival of cheap data — wireless broadband consumption had exploded from under 200 million GB a month in mid-2016 to 1.3 billion GB a month by early 2017 — had put smartphones in hundreds of millions of hands, and with them came viral rumours: claims that the new Rs 2,000 notes carried GPS-tracking nanochips, panics about salt shortages that triggered bulk buying across states, and a torrent of communally charged misinformation on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Sinha, who had watched misinformation drown out real reporting during the 2016 Dalit Asmita Yatra march from Ahmedabad to Una, quit his engineering career to build a dedicated fact-checking portal.
The site's early months established its method and its reputation. In June 2017, Alt News demonstrated that the Union Home Ministry had used a photograph of the Spanish-Moroccan border to claim it had installed floodlights on India's borders — a finding reported by the BBC that subjected the ministry to nationwide mockery. It identified the individuals running the Hindu right-wing website DainikBharat.org; showed that a video purportedly showing a Hindu man being lynched by Muslims in Bihar was actually from Bangladesh; and demonstrated that a video allegedly depicting a Marwari girl married to a Muslim man being burnt to death for not wearing a burqa was Guatemalan in origin. These forensic debunks, each documented step by step, became the template for the outlet's journalism.
Pratik Sinha, Alt News's co-founder, trained and worked as a software engineer specialising in wireless and embedded systems, including stints in the United States and Vietnam. He was raised in an activist household: his father, Mukul Sinha, was a lawyer who represented the families of victims of encounter cases following the 2002 Gujarat riots as well as the Sohrabuddin and Ishrat Jahan cases, and his mother, Nirjhari Sinha, is a longtime activist. In 2013, Pratik and his parents built the non-profit website Truth of Gujarat to document ground realities in the state that they felt traditional media ignored.
The turning point came in August 2016, when Sinha joined his mother on the Dalit Asmita Yatra, the ten-day, 350-kilometre protest march from Ahmedabad to Una led by activist Jignesh Mevani after seven Dalits were flogged by a vigilante mob for skinning a dead cow. Sinha documented the march on Twitter with the hashtag #ChaloUna and noticed that while mainstream media was largely absent, misinformation about the event travelled fast. The experience convinced him that the internet's power for social good was being captured by bad actors — and that countering misinformation required full-time, professional work. He quit his job, and in February 2017 launched Alt News. In 2017 he was invited to the Google NewsLab Asia-Pacific Summit to discuss solutions to fake news, and he has since become one of the most recognised figures in global fact-checking.
Mohammed Zubair, Alt News's co-founder, came to fact-checking from social media itself. Before Alt News, he ran the popular Facebook page 'Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy', which had more than 700,000 followers and specialised in demystifying fake news and political claims. His fluency in the grammar of viral content — how it is made, how it spreads, who amplifies it — made him a natural partner for Sinha's forensic engineering approach, and he became the public face of many of the outlet's most consequential investigations.
Zubair was among the first journalists to flag the controversial remarks about the Prophet Muhammad made by a BJP spokesperson in 2022, comments that triggered a diplomatic crisis for the Modi government as Muslim-majority nations protested and the party suspended the spokesperson. Weeks later, on 27 June 2022, Zubair was arrested by the Delhi Police for allegedly hurting religious sentiments over an old tweet — an arrest his colleague Sinha said was made without the mandatory prior notice. The detention drew widespread condemnation, including from Congress leaders Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh, activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan, and international press-freedom observers; Reporters Without Borders' 2022 Press Freedom Index, published the same year, had ranked India 150th of 180 countries. Zubair was eventually granted bail, but the episode cemented Alt News's status as both a journalistic and a political story.
Alt News's methodology is forensic and transparent. Its fact-checks typically begin with a viral claim — a video, image, forwarded message or quote — and work backward: reverse-image searches to find an image's first appearance, frame-by-frame video analysis, geolocation, metadata examination, and comparison against primary sources such as government records, news archives and official statements. Crucially, the outlet archives the original posts it debunks, so that its evidence cannot be erased by deletion, and it publishes its reasoning step by step so readers can follow the verification themselves.
The site has also compiled a public list of more than 30 fake-news sources, most of them aligned with right-wing viewpoints, documenting the networks that manufacture and amplify misinformation. Its beat is not limited to one ideology — it has debunked false claims from across the political spectrum — but its investigations have disproportionately exposed misinformation originating in right-wing ecosystems, a pattern its critics cite and its editors defend as a reflection of where organised disinformation is concentrated. The outlet publishes in English and Hindi, recognising that misinformation's largest audiences are vernacular.
Alt News's catalogue of investigations reads as a chronicle of India's misinformation age. Beyond the Home Ministry floodlights episode, it exposed the networks behind coordinated fake-news websites; traced doctored videos used to incite communal tension during elections and riots; debunked fabricated quotes attributed to historical figures and contemporary leaders; and punctured viral health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its work on hate speech — documenting the ecosystem of accounts that generate and amplify communal provocations — has been cited by researchers, journalists and policymakers.
The outlet's reporting has had real-world consequences: its exposés have occasionally been picked up by mainstream media and have led to police complaints, content takedowns and public corrections by officials and media houses. During elections, its rapid-response debunks of viral falsehoods — old images presented as current rallies, misattributed speeches, fabricated exit-poll graphics — have served as a public utility for voters navigating information warfare. In Sinha's formulation, fact-checkers 'cannot stop bad actors from pushing out misinformation' — they can only 'control the velocity'.
Alt News is owned and run by the Pravda Media Foundation, a non-profit entity, and is headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It describes itself as independent and non-partisan, claiming no political affiliation or corporate funding and relying on public donations — a reader-funded model designed to insulate its journalism from the commercial and political pressures that shape much of Indian media. The organisation keeps a small, specialised team of fact-checkers, researchers and editors rather than a large general newsroom.
The outlet was a signatory partner of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), the global standard-setter for fact-checking organisations, until April 2020. The IFCN code of principles — covering non-partisanship, transparency of sources, funding and methodology, and open corrections — shaped the outlet's public accountability framework. Its non-profit, donation-based structure has been both its shield and its vulnerability: it protects editorial independence but leaves the organisation exposed to financial pressure and to the legal and political risks its founders have personally borne.
Alt News's work has made it one of the most contested media brands in India. Its targets — the websites and social-media networks whose fabrications it exposes — have accused it of selective fact-checking, arguing that it scrutinises right-wing misinformation more aggressively than falsehoods from other ideological directions. Critics from right-wing and Hindu-advocacy circles have alleged a pattern of narrative framing and ideological alignment with left-leaning perspectives, while the outlet maintains that its docket reflects the empirical distribution of organised disinformation.
The founders have faced sustained harassment: Sinha has received threats to his life demanding that he stop producing content, and both founders have been subjected to years of online trolling, including by accounts linked to the ruling BJP's support networks. Zubair's 2022 arrest intensified the debate over whether fact-checkers in India are protected or persecuted. The outlet's defenders argue that the ferocity of the attacks is itself evidence of its effectiveness — that it has become a threat precisely because its debunks work.
Alt News's significance lies in having professionalised fact-checking in India before the country's institutions caught up. When it launched in 2017, dedicated fact-checking was a novelty; today, fact-checking desks exist across Indian media, platforms run election-integrity programmes, and misinformation is recognised as a first-order democratic threat. Alt News helped create that recognition, demonstrating through hundreds of documented investigations that viral falsehoods are not random noise but an organised ecosystem with authors, amplifiers and political functions.
Its methods have been adopted and adapted across the industry, its alumni and imitators populate a growing fact-checking sector, and its public-interest litigation-adjacent role — supplying verified evidence to courts, police and journalists — has made it a quasi-institutional actor. Nearly a decade after two former techies started it in Ahmedabad, Alt News remains the reference point for the proposition that in an age of synthetic media and weaponised virality, verification is not a feature of journalism but its foundation.
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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Overview Citizen Matters is a Bengaluru-based nonprofit civic journalism platform that reports on Indian cities from the citizen's perspective. Launched in 2008, it covers urban governance, environment, public…
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