The videos that have surfaced on social media from Jamia Milia Islamia University on the fateful night of the 15th December, when Delhi Police was forced to enter the campus in order to flush out miscreants engaging in violence against the Citizenship Amendment Act, have created quite a furore. Amidst all the controversy, AltNews was engaged in a dedicated effort to shield the rioters at the Jamia Milia Islamia University.
However, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t whitewash the sins of the Jamia ‘students’ as numerous videos surfaced where the ‘students’ could be clearly seen with stones in their hands. OpIndia too released some still from a CCTV footage where the very students who were there in the library could be seen holding stones.
Under such circumstances, people on social media were greatly repulsed by the propagandist’s efforts towards whitewashing the crimes and took to social media to vent their frustration. One person on social media urged people to register their complaint with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a cartel of Leftist fact-checking organizations that issues certificates to like-minded news websites.
This long hair guy was having ‘wallets’ in both hands? Expose ALTnews in the IFCN form. They exist just to whitewash jihadi violence!
In the drop-down ALT news = ‘Pravada Media Foundation’https://t.co/IMTG6Wbs38#FakeItLikeAltNews. Plz RT https://t.co/MhP249Y1RE
— Vikas Pandey (@MODIfiedVikas) February 18, 2020
AltNews is mentioned at the IFCN complaint form by the name of its parent company, the Pravda Media Foundation. A complaint was filed earlier as well when it was revealed that Pratik Sinha, its founder, was in violation of the IFCN code of principles through his membership of the Jan Sangharsh Manch. No action was taken against AltNews then and IFCN declared the political activists ‘neutral’ even after the propagandists lied in their response.
Many others also pointed towards the inherent bias of AltNews and the fact that they had too spread fake news earlier right after the Jamia riots.
कम से कम 3 पत्रकारों और 2 वेबसाइट ने 15 दिसम्बर को खबर चलाई कि #जामिया में 3 छात्र पुलिस की गोली से मारे गये हैं l खबर चलाने वाले @free_thinker जी के फूफा थे इसलिए @AltNews ने फूफा की खबर का फैक्ट चेक नहीं किया जो दरअसल #FakeNews थी l #FakeItLikeAltNews
— Ashok Shrivastav (@ashokshrivasta6) February 18, 2020
Since then, AltNews has continued to engage in propaganda and make farfetched claims without any evidence to boost. In its most recent work of propaganda, AltNews claimed that the student seen in one of the videos wasn’t carry a stone in his hand but a wallet. It was then claimed that this video was used by people to “water down” the instance of ‘police brutality’. The insinuation here was obvious that in the absence of that specific video, there was nothing in the public domain to justify the actions of the Police. However, the same student was spotted in another video among a bunch of students carrying stones in their hands.
AltNews also engages in blatant political partisanship while preaching neutrality. It regularly ignores fake news spread by liberals and gives them a free pass. For instance, when liberals had engaged in rumour-mongering about the death of a student during the Police action in Jamia, AltNews, to our knowledge, had not done any fact-check of the blatant lies that were spread.
