India's top fact-checking site altnews.in non-partisan: IFCN sets aside complaint

By A Representative
In a major victory for India’s top fact-checking website, altnews.in, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) – a unit of the Florida-based Poynter Institute “dedicated” to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide to “support a booming crop of fact-checking initiatives by promoting best practices and exchanges in this field” – has set aside a complaint that it is violating IFCN’s nonpartisanship policy. The site altnews.in is a certified member of IFCN.
IFCN said, in early June, @factchecknet had “received a series of complaints from India about @AltNews” (the twitter handle of altnews.in), saying that the organization's founder was linked to a political organization.
IFCN’s Baybars Örsek @baybarsorsek said, on June 13, IFCN extended a series of questions to @AltNews and received responses by June 20, adding, “After consultations with the assessor of the application and in-depth consideration of the issue”, IFCN decided that “there is no ground to take any action against @AltNews.”
The reason, according to Örsek, is @AltNews “has been able to demonstrate that the organization in question is not a registered body or a political organization linked to a political party in India”, and has shared “10 fact-checks that they have published in the last couple of months, which is a prerequisite for new applications, and showed a non-partisan approach in those examples.”
The complainants had particularly stated that altnews.in’s founder Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) has being a member of a human rights organization, Jan Sangharsh Manch (JSM), based in Ahmedabad. Following the complaint, there was incessant trolling of the website and its founder Sinha.
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Click HERE for altnews.in reply to IFCN queries

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