Alt News
Indian independent fact-checking website
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. Alt News was a signatory partner of the International Fact-Checking Network until April 2020.
History
Alt News was founded in Ahmedabad 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 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 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 by Hrishikesh Mukherjee.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alt News” as indian independent fact-checking website. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as indian independent fact-checking website. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39056034. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2020, 2013 and 2016.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alt News” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.