SRINAGAR, India — For five years, Alt News has fought India’s rise in disinformation tied to Hindu nationalism, with Twitter as one of the main battlefields.
The fact-checking website’s work debunking fake news and calling out hate speech by powerful people against India’s ethnic and religious minorities has made it one of the country’s leading independent news outlets, earning its founders a mention on an unofficial shortlist for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
“We are able to make certain topics the center of conversation” on Twitter, said Pratik Sinha, who founded Alt News with a fellow software engineer, Mohammed Zubair.
In addition to using Twitter to defuse tensions both online and offline, the nonprofit Alt News relies on the platform as an important source of crowdfunding.
All that is now in jeopardy amid the chaos at Twitter since its takeover last month by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. With 24 million users, India is Twitter’s third-largest market after the U.S. and Japan, as well as one of its greatest challenges. But more than 90% of Twitter’s 200-odd employees in India were reportedly among the thousands worldwide who have lost their jobs under Musk’s ownership.
As in the U.S., the layoffs in India cut deeply into some of Twitter’s most critical teams, including those dealing with government information requests and content moderation.
In an open letter last month, U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk urged Musk to make human rights central to his management, noting the pressure that Twitter and other social media platforms have come under from governments around the world over freedom of expression.
“Like all companies, Twitter needs to understand the harms associated with its platform and take steps to address them,” he wrote.
This story was originally published in nbcnews.com . Read the full story here
