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OpIndia is an Indian news portal which claims to be a fact-checking website. It is ideologically oriented towards right-wing populism and has propagated fake news over multiple occasions.

History

OpIndia was founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal as a current affairs and news website. In October 2016, it was acquired by Kovai Media Private Limited, a Coimbatore-based company of T. V. Mohandas Pai, that also owns the right-leaning magazine Swarajya.

Later, it was disassociated from the group and became a separate entity; Nupur J Sharma is the current editor.

Content and reception

AltNews has documented the site to be a significant purveyor of fake news, in India.

A January 2020 report by the media watchdog Newslaundry noted the portal to contain several inflammatory headlines selectively targeting the leftists, liberals and Muslims. Islamophobia was noted to be a dominant theme, achieved either by selective manipulation or outright faking. The political opposition (esp. Indian National Congress) and mainstream media was a favorite target of their vitriol; posts published by OpIndia Hindi from November 15 to 29 were located to be invariably situated against any criticism of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Most of the pieces contained brazenly abusive commentary on the subjects.

In May 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an affiliate of the Poynter Institute, rejected OpIndia's application to be accredited as a fact-checker; among a variety of reasons, it noted political partisanism, poor fact-checking methodologies and general polemic commentary accompanying their news-pieces as significant contributors towards the rejection. The rejection disqualified OpIndia for fact-checking contracts with web properties owned by Facebook and Google.

References

1. Bhushan/TheWire, Sandeep (2017-01-26). "Arnab's Republic hints at mainstreaming right-wing opinion as a business". Business Standard India. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
2. Sources supporting OpIndia to follow a right wing ideology:
   • Bhushan/TheWire, Sandeep (2017-01-26). "Arnab's Republic hints at mainstreaming right-wing opinion as a business". Business Standard India. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
   • Ananth, Venkat (2019-05-07). "Can fact-checking emerge as big and viable business?". The Economic Times. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
   • Mihindukulasuriya, Regina (2019-05-08). "BJP supporters have a secret weapon in their online poll campaign — satire". ThePrint. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
   • Ghosh, Labonita (17 June 2018). "The troll who turned". Mumbai Mirror. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
   • Manish, Sai (8 April 2018). "Busting fake news: Who funds whom?". Rediff. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
   • Chaturvedi, Swati (2016). I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP's Digital Army. Juggernaut Books. pp. 11, 23. ISBN 9789386228093.
   • "Tables Turn on Twitter's Hindutva Warriors, and It's the BJP Doing the Strong-Arming". The Wire. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
3. Sources supporting OpIndia to have disseminated fake news:
   • "Search results for OpIndia". Alt News. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
   • "Search results for OpIndia". BOOM. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
   • Santanu Chakrabarti (20 November 2018). "DUTY, IDENTITY, CREDIBILITY – Fake news and the ordinary citizen in India" (PDF). BBC. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
   • "Debunking False Allegations About Amartya Sen and Nalanda University". The Wire. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
   • Khuhro, Zarrar (2018-07-09). "Digital death". DAWN.COM. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
   • Saxena, Gaurav (17 July 2017). "A day without fake news: BJP IT Cell's protest against police action". Newslaundry.
   • Tiwari, Ayush (19 August 2018). "What the 'fact-checks' on Modi's gutter-gas theory didn't tell us". Newslaundry.
   • Kumar, Basant (3 January 2020). "Fake news, lies, Muslim bashing, and Ravish Kumar: Inside OpIndia's harrowing world". Newslaundry. Retrieved 3 January 2020.
4. ^ Manish, Sai (2018-04-07). "Right vs Wrong: Arundhati Roy, Mohandas Pai funding fake news busters". Business Standard India. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
5. Roushan, Rahul (2018-11-23). "Announcement: OpIndia is now a separate legal and business entity - Opindia News". OpIndia. Retrieved 2019-11-30.
6. "Search results for OpIndia". Alt News. Retrieved 10 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
7. ^ Kumar, Basant (3 January 2020). "Fake news, lies, Muslim bashing, and Ravish Kumar: Inside OpIndia's harrowing world". Newslaundry. Retrieved 3 January 2020.
8. Ananth, Venkat (2019-05-07). "Can fact-checking emerge as big and viable business?". The Economic Times. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
9. Kaur, Kanchan (11 February 2019). "Conclusions and recommendations on the application by OpIndia.com". International Fact-Checking Network. Archived from the original on 10 March 2019. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
10. Ananth, Venkat (7 May 2019). "Can fact-checking emerge as big and viable business?". The Economic Times. Retrieved 2019-12-12.

• Indian websites
• Media in India
• Watchdog journalism