 With 18,000 organic followers on Twitter and 35,000 on Facebook, it is difficult not to notice Pratik Sena's altnews.in. Post 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidential elections in the United States, the concept of post-truth and fake news became common. Now in India, we need another scrutiny of the fake news concept. We have with us Pratik Sena today. He's been gracious enough to call us to his home. Welcome Pratik and thank you for talking to us. Thank you. You've just returned from a conference in Singapore, a Google conference in Singapore. Can you spell out what are the new techniques and tools that Google has devised to help counter fake news? And what was your entire experience of that conference? Lately there has been a huge explosion in the fake news and it is evident from the effect that it is having. With eight people getting lynched in Jharkhand because of the issue, because of a fake WhatsApp forward. And then in 2014, Techie got murdered in Pune and now the riots in West Bengal which started from a morphed image. And then it was fueled further with different morphed image from other sides. And this phenomenon is not limited to India. It has been noticed in elections in other Asia, Pacific countries as well. So Google News Lab wanted to help various media organizations with various tools and features that Google has come up with to counter this issue. Where they are helping, you know, various news desks around the world deal with this issue of fake news. If there's a breaking news in an area, then how to geo search tweets that are happening in that to verify that, you know, if somebody has posted a video claiming that such a such event has happened, whether it's a bomb blast or a riot breaking out. You know, how to geo search tweets in that area to see what other people are talking about. Because when such an issue happens, you obviously have, you know, a reaction from multiple people. But a collection of tools that can be used to fact check issues, fact check breaking news and so on. You know, they are now recognizing fact checkers, you know, who are given a chance to come to the stage and narrate their stories. But do you think Facebook's engagement with the fake news phenomenon is at par with the kind of initiative Google is taking right now? At least from the point of view of India, it is not. Facebook US has introduced a feature where, you know, if you post an article, they might show a warning saying that this has been reported as fake by various organizations. They also have partnered with a few organizations but very limited like Politifact, etc. They are also depending a lot on the reporting process that is built into Facebook, something which I'm not entirely comfortable with because anybody can report anything. You know, the political polarization is so much that in whether it is US or India, people report things as mobs on online media. So I don't know how does Facebook take that as genuine feedback and implement it in this process. But, you know, they have definitely not done anything from the point of view of this whole fake news explosion in India. How do you differentiate the era of fake news with the era of clickbait and plain propaganda? You know, many of these organizations, especially in Asia, they said that it hasn't come to the election process yet. For example, Malaysia is going to have an election very soon and the fact checker from Malaysia said that we are anticipating a lot of sort of misplaced political propaganda once the elections come up. So that is one thing which is different in India that misinformation slash disinformation has become a huge part of election process for a very long time now. Young people in the age group of 20 to 30 with her right ideological leaning have also figured out a business model around it. You mean the right wing ideological leaning? They have figured out a business model around this area and if you look at all the fake news websites that have come up, you know, you realize that they are not in fact being driven by ideology. They have ideological leaning and there's no doubt about it. But what they are being driven by is the economics of this entire thing, you know, the money that they are making essentially. Can you tell us a bit more about what is really the economic model of these young people who are enticed to engage with fake news as a business enterprise? You have punctured enough of their organizations. Can you tell us what you have found? So what I have found and this is uniform across the board is that, you know, they obviously have the usual techniques of clickbait titles and narrative which sort of is incendiary in nature. You know, they are trying to evoke an extreme emotion via the way of their narrative. But what I have also noticed is that, you know, you have these set of 8 to 12 boxes at the bottom of the article or on the sidebar, which when you click takes you to a website, to a particular link, not a website, but a particular article on a website. All these fake news websites, they uniformly use 2-3, you know, audience networks of 2-3 companies, namely MGID, which is a Ukrainian-American company, Revcontent, which is another American company. A lot of semi-new pictures, you know, as profile images and things like, you know, a lot to do with male virility and things like that. So essentially... Sleazy content. Yeah, sleazy content. They are enticing people by creating a series of Facebook pages which have genuine following. They have pages like, you know, I support Indian Army. Finally, they have some pages like Hot Desi Girls as well. And, you know, these are pages which Garner many likes, you know, a huge number of likes in a very short time. This is the list that we found out through our research, but it is impossible to find the entire list. But they have access to literally millions of followers, which they use to push traffic into these websites. Many, many a times the content, you know, as I described is, you know, something that evokes an extreme reaction. Other times it is just pure, you know, crap, bullshit. A user when he or she is looking at this website, you know, at the end they are looking for an exit route. And that is when, you know, they come to the bottom of the article and they see these audience networks and, you know, many of them click on that. And that is how they are raking up the money. Tell me a bit more about the people that are running these websites. So would you say largely that they are young people under the age group of, say, 20 to 40? Very young. You know, there was a trend called I support Rohit Sardana on Twitter, which Rohit Sardana eventually said that, you know, there's no fatwa against me. The trend was because somebody claimed that there's a fatwa against Rohit Sardana. I traced that to a website called newsport.in. And I put out that story and then after a few days he contacted me, you know, and he was a class 12 boy. I was conflicted as to what to think about it because his father was a farmhand. He lives in Ranchi in a hostel, apparently. And his father is a farmhand, some, you know, in a village close to Ranchi, where he makes just 6000 rupees a month. And he's like, I cannot continue my education. And he has narrated the story not just to me, but to, I think, Yuthkia was, you know, he says that openly. He has no sort of ethical slash moral issues about it because he says that I am doing this to make money for my education. But the right cleaning aspect, you know, if you look at his Facebook profile, he clearly says, you know, member of Bajrandal slash RSS, etc. Which is also my next question. So I think it will be wrong to say that this is entirely right-leaning or that propaganda just comes from the right and not from any other political ideology. But would you say that a majority and a sweeping majority of this kind of propaganda and fake news is being generated by people who follow a certain ideology? Fake news is of three kinds. One is WhatsApp videos, images, text forwards. And the third type is fake news websites. The WhatsApp images forward slash, especially the text, you know, propaganda which makes various claims that such and such party did so much, that is of all kinds, you know, political propaganda. As we have seen historically, there is no leading per se. But I can authoritatively say that the fake news websites, the websites are 95% right-leaning and there is no doubt about it. If I ask you, name one fake news website which does not have a, you know, right-wing ideology, I am sure you will struggle to name one. So that is definitely right-wing domain, the fake news websites. When it comes to videos slash images, they have been both, you know, they have been from both sides. For example, last year we saw a picture of Mr. Modi. You know, it was being portrayed as if Mr. Modi is sleeping in the parliament. But it was a very short clip, 3-4 second clip. And then when I looked at the larger clip of the Rajya Sabha video, it was very apparent that, you know, he was just looking down for a moment and then that was sort of forwarded as, you know, Mr. Modi is sleeping. And I think that has happened multiple times, you know, where people are just looking down in the parliament and, you know, it is forwarded as, you know, people sleeping. I would say the largely communal content is right-wing. Yes, where, you know, it is being shown that Muslim mob killing somebody, a Hindu person, you know. And that narrative has been carried in multiple of these fake videos. And then, for example, recently after the Champions Trophy final match in India versus Pakistan, again, multiple fake videos came out saying that Indian Muslims are celebrating Pakistan's win. So, all these videos are specially circulated to benefit the right-wing politics. Let me ask you a controversial question now. Can you draw links between the people that are running these websites and the larger machinery of right-wing politics in India? And let me spell it out. You know, I cannot say that BJP is running these websites. I cannot say that I don't have any evidence. I have obviously seen traces. For example, there's a website called insistpost.com, which we have written about on allfnews.in. The guy who runs it, a couple of guys who run it, I have seen pictures of them being invited to BJP events, pictures of them with Sunita Irani, Amit Shah, etc. Again, postcard.news, one of the guys who runs it, runs it in Mahesh Vikram Higde. He was an active campaigner for BJP in 2014 elections. You know, I have seen him with multiple people. So, but that is not evidence that BJP is running it. Correct. This could be very well, be very well. Inspiration. Yeah, a thing which comes out of ideology and now they realize that, wow, there's a great business model around it. The end-to-end encryption ensures that there is a massive problem that fake news cannot be checked on WhatsApp. So, can you tell us a bit about the existing tools or if there are any to check fake news on WhatsApp? See, it's a double-edged sword, you know. And I would want the encryption to be there as an individual, because I often make calls, I prefer WhatsApp because I know it is end-to-end encrypted. In 2016 in Oona, where after four Dalit boys were flogged, and that video became viral and that led to a huge movement. Now, that wouldn't have happened without WhatsApp. The negative side is obviously these videos which I spoke about. There's a video which has been viral since Feb 2016, where a video has been taken from Gyote Mala. The claim is that the Muslim mob is killing a Hindu girl, Hindu Marwadi girl in Hyderabad, because she was not wearing a burqa. Now, this video is from Gyote Mala has got nothing to do with the narrative. The crowd is not Muslim. You know, it was a case of a crime, you know, somebody shot a taxi driver and one of the people was caught and they were unfortunately mob lynched. What you see is that when these videos are shared, you'll see that the text that the video is using, not a single comma or a full-stuff has changed in the past one and a half years. And that happens because it is being forwarded on WhatsApp. A small percentage of people decide that they want to post it on their Facebook timeline and they copy the text and they put the image and paste the text, which is why since it is forwarding on WhatsApp for such a long time, that is why the text hasn't changed. So, you know, that is when I say it is a double-edged sword and that is where the platforms have to step in. The problem for platforms like Facebook is that they can't read what is going on. They can't see what is being transmitted on because when it is being transmitted on between two individual users, let's say I and you, you know, are exchanging a piece of fake information and I do that with some other person, the content looks completely different because it has been encrypted using a unique set of keys. Again, since everything is encrypted, I don't know how Facebook, you know, WhatsApp being a Facebook property now, I don't know how Facebook will approach the huge phenomenon of fake news on WhatsApp but they have to do something about it and urgently. But see, would you say that the rise of fake news and fake news watchers in India has made or has rendered the old school fact-checking system within media organizations redundant and why I ask this is because the skill sets that are required when you fact-check a piece of fake information on the internet in the age of information will be very different from what the fact-checking teams were doing within media organizations in the 1980s. So can you also spell out the new skill set that is required to be a fact-checker in India today? Yes, there are new skills and I'll elaborate on those but that is not an excuse for mainstream media organization to shirk away from it. They have massive loads of money, you know, I have been a software engineer and that is why I know certain skills but there are a million software engineers in India. This is not rocket science at all and I think there is a presentation on first draft which people can get access to if they request to see what are the tools that you are using. Media organizations, mainstream media organizations in India need to invest in this area because this fake news issue cannot be solved just by two, three small-time fact-checkers and we are small-time fact-checkers, you know, the reach that we have. Your story in alt-news has debunked how times now and ZTV have, you know, been party to this whole game and have spread misinformation through their channels. Would you argue that they lack the intention to do this? I don't know if I want to call it fake news but let's say let's call it fake news. For example, Najeeb's story where it was claimed that he was associated with ISIS by Raj Shikharja from Times of India, you know, and it was a front-page lead. There's a credibility issue in mainstream media. You know, you can say that Raj Shikharja published that story or you can tag Vinit Jain on Twitter and tell him that, you know, what is happening. We put out that story at 12 and 9 or 2 a.m. there was a pinned tweet on Times Now Twitter account putting out a disclaimer. There are also certain fake news against the BJP government which websites like OpIndia have debunked, you know. You cannot ignore that. So again, it might have a leaning but the issue is on both sides. But at the end of the day, there is a certain sense of accountability in terms of mainstream media. They are not running under a cover of anonymity. They cannot run away. We cannot equate these fake news websites and the mainstream media in the same bucket and it would be extremely unfair because that is what these fake news websites want, you know. Every forward will end with a center saying that Bikau Media will not tell you where they want to take away the complete credibility of mainstream media. Of a certain section of the mainstream media rather. Yes, yes. There's obviously a targeted propaganda against NDTV, etc. Typically in these fake news forwards that I have seen, they'll specifically say that Bikau Media will not tell you. So they are not sort of identifying a particular organization but they are trying to claim that this entire mainstream media organization has an agenda which will never show you real news. Apart from basic common sense, what are the skill sets required to engage with information or misinformation in the internet age? What will your answer be? All it needs is a Google reverse image search. In case of fake videos, what you do is you splice up the video into individual frames and then you look up these individual frames to see if this video has been used in the past and what context has been used in the past. So Pradeep, can you tell us a bit about your own story and about all news in particular and also we'd be interested to know what are your future plans and how is it that you're generating, what is your own economic model and how is it, where do you see the organization grow from here? Right now there is no economic model. Right now it is purely voluntary organization. We are in process of registering a not-for-profit company and we hope to sort of reach out for donations and also hope to reach out to certain foundations who would like to fund such fact-checking initiatives. So from truth of Gujarat to all news, you are running to very highly risky websites, endeavors, have you Pratik Sena ever encountered any fear or any kind of danger? Has anybody challenged you in such a way? But obviously it was my father's identity that was associated with truth of Gujarat but all news is definitely my identity is associated with it and in I think March 1st week I got a call saying that you know, Likna ban kar do nahi the goli maar denge, kind of a thing but it could be a prank call. You know when you are in this business you can't be sensitive. You know you can't be ultra sensitive and you know you have to take it and you have to ignore certain things. All news being given prominence by certain media organizations, you know the certain sections which are obviously being threatened and so the amount of hate has increased lately. So we hope that the hate dies down and the possibilities increase all the best Pratik Sena and thank you for talking to us.