#opindia

[indizombie]

What OpIndia does in India is not very different from what newspapers like Der Stürumer did in Nazi Germany or Kangura did in Rwanda. At a time when the government is supposedly quick in taking down violent and false content, it is inconceivable for anyone with a remotely rational mind to think that a platform like OpIndia can do what it does without the state machinery turning a blind eye.

Alishan Jafri, journalist

[nando161mando]

"An X account with the same user name and handle @WirathuAshin with 23000+ followers regularly shares anti-Muslim tweets and incites its audience against the community.

An investigation by Alt News has now revealed that this X account is being run by an Indian named Anurag Tiwari, who has links with the Right-wing propaganda website, OpIndia. The controversial Myanmar monk, Ashin Wirathu, has no connection with this X handle."

https://www.altnews.in/wirathuashin-amplifying-hate-on-x-is-an-indian-user-not-the-radical-buddhist-monk-ashin-wirathu-from-myanmar/

[pebblegalaxy]

Unraveling the Nexus of Journalism and Ideology: The Guardian vs. OpIndia

Unraveling the Nexus of Journalism and Ideology: The Guardian vs. OpIndia #JournalismEthics #MediaBias #GuardianVsOpIndia #MediaIntegrity

Unraveling the Nexus of Journalism and Ideology: A Tale of Accusations and Exposés In the realm of journalism, where the pursuit of truth intertwines with the complexities of ideology, recent events have cast a spotlight on the intricate dance between media organizations and their underlying agendas. The unfolding saga between The Guardian, a prominent British newspaper, and OpIndia, an Indian…

[sivavakkiyar]

The Somaiya School in Mumbai has asked its principal Parveen Shaikh to resign after OpIndia – a Hindutva website accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech – published an article targeting her for her purported political views.

Shaikh has worked at the private school in the city’s Vidyavihar locality for 12 years and has been its principal for over seven years.

On April 24, OpIndia carried a story claiming to expose Shaikh’s “disturbing social media behaviour”. It accused her of being a “Hamas-sympathiser”, “anti-Hindu” and a supporter of “Islamist Umar Khalid” based on posts that she had “liked” from her Twitter account.

On April 26 afternoon, the management of The Somaiya School asked Shaikh to step down, Shaikh told Scroll.

“They expressed their disappointment with the content of the OpIndia article,” Shaikh told Scroll. “They have said [asking me to step down] was a tough decision for them to make, but this association cannot be continued.”

Shaikh added: “The management acknowledges my hard work and contribution to shaping The Somaiya School. However, they said they were under immense pressure to take action against me. They have not specified grounds other than the OpIndia article.”

[…]

Shaikh rarely posts on her Twitter account. When she does, it is related to education. However, she has “liked” several posts in support of the besieged territory of Gaza, where Israel and Hamas have been fighting a war since October.

Shaikh also liked several posts that were critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political regime.

[incorrectmahabharatquotes]

that hindutva citing opindia as one of their sources is killing me 😂

According to them, OpIndia and Swarajya are the pinnacle of "independent" journalism. Because writing wild conspiracy theories is called journalism now. Do you think if I started writing random ass claims with no facts and sources to back it up, I could also become a journalist?

My latest favourite is OpIndia's claim that WIRED is "far left" and attacking them, like we all don't know WIRED is centre-left at best:

OpIndia: We don't post hatred, we're just giving voice to what our readers think.

Also OpIndia: "WIRED must realise that OpIndia is not dependent on foreign funding and therefore, we are immune to their forced sensibilities which force them to share their bed with barbarians." "these brown slaves are a dime a dozen."

"Barbarians", "slaves", "zombies", it's words like this that are echoed by some of the hindutva blogs and I always remain surprised at how they can't see the fact that it's a concerted effort to dehumanize anyone who's not like them. It's a CLASSIC move people do all the time and you should be SO CAUTIOUS about it. The minute you start seeing other people as less than human is the minute you start slipping down the rabbit hole of propaganda. All people on all parts of the political spectrum are capable of falling into this hole and they should be vigilant about it.

- Mod S

[timetravellingkitty]

Do you know any popular Hindutuva news publications? I’m working on an essay and wanna see some of their talk points/perspectives on some shit lmao (+maybe i wanna be petty and debunk some claims <3)

OpIndia and Swarajya are two news portals that are very right wing (iirc OpIndia used to be owner by Swarajya). OpIndia in particular publishes a lot of fake news. I don't remember any others rn but you could start with these two

[mariacallous]

In 2017, Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair cofounded the fact-checking website AltNews in India. Almost immediately, the pair were targeted with persistent and vicious attacks from the far-right news website OpIndia. Many of the attacks claimed that Zubair was a Rohingya Muslim who illegally migrated to India and that his cousin was a rapist. In several headlines, the site described Zubair as an “Islamist” spreading fake news.

This wasn’t far off from OpIndia’s other coverage: In addition to routinely attacking journalists and news sites critical of the government, OpIndia spreads conspiracies and, at times, outright disinformation, particularly about the country’s minority Muslim population. Founded in 2014, OpIndia is regularly name-checked by leading lawmakers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the site admits it is funded in part by ads run by the BJP. As hundreds of millions of Indians vote in elections across the country, critics fear that OpIndia’s election-related disinformation and overt support of the Modi government could further undermine trust in the democratic process. Already, the website has echoed Modi’s widely criticized description of the Muslim vote as “vote jihad.”

Yet despite this, US tech companies, which have rules against hate speech and disinformation, continue to platform OpIndia and, in some cases, allow it to continue to make money through advertising. OpIndia has a robust presence on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Additionally, a new report, shared exclusively with WIRED, has found that Google’s ad platform is being used to partially fund OpIndia’s operation.

“In an increasingly polarized space, they create a vicious narrative against you,” Sinha tells WIRED. “All of this is narrative building. Their job is to defame anyone who's critical of the government, and that's what they do.”

Despite repeated efforts by activists to defund the site—and the fact that publications that have partnered with a Google-supported election fact-checking initiative, Shakti, have fact-checked OpIndia’s articles and found it routinely publishes fake news—OpIndia continues to operate thanks in part to ads that Google’s ad exchange platform places next to its content. In 2019, Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network, which accredits publications as trustworthy arbiters of information, rejected OpIndia’s application.

“Google’s own publisher policies prohibit the monetization of content that incites hatred, incitement of racism, promoting discrimination of an individual or group,” says Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy and partnerships at Check My Ads, a nonprofit digital advertising watchdog organization and author of the new report. “Google also says that they don't monetize or work with publishers that make claims that are false and could significantly undermine trust in an election or democratic process.”

Ad exchanges allow publishers to sell ad space and advertisers to buy it through an entirely automated process that happens in the split seconds before a website loads. Ad sellers and buyers set limits for price and spending, with Google taking a cut of all transactions. Because of the automated nature of the process, advertisers likely don’t realize that their products are showing up next to hateful and misleading content.

Other ad exchanges such as Magnite have discontinued working with OpIndia. If Google were to stop working with OpIndia, says Wiley, that “would definitely have a material impact.”

On Facebook, OpIndia runs pages in English and Hindi, with 310,000 followers and 431,000 followers in each language, respectively. Both pages list their administrator as Aadhyaasi Media and Content Services Private Limited, which owns OpIndia.

On its Hindi page, OpIndia has shared stories promoting the “love jihad” conspiracy theory, which asserts that Muslim men are trying to marry, seduce, or kidnap Hindus in order to force them to convert and create a demographic shift in Hindu-majority India, and has promoted false claims, including that a new inheritance law would reallocate wealth from Hindus to Muslims. Meta spokesperson Erin McPike did not comment on whether this content violated Meta’s policies, nor on whether Meta takes into account the violations of the Hindi page when assessing the English page.

These narratives then get picked up and spread on other platforms, like X and Telegram, says Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “In some of these places there’s even more explicit calls for violence against Muslims or for the removal of Muslims,” he says. The site has international appeal as well: WIRED was able to find OpIndia articles shared in non-Indian, right-wing channels on Telegram, including a pro-Kremlin channel with over 1.3 million subscribers and numerous conspiracy channels with hundreds of thousands of followers.

The site is also highly active on the social media platform X with the official OpIndia account, which has 688,000 subscribers. OpIndia appears to pay for X Premium, giving it a blue checkmark, but did not respond to whether it subscribes to the service. WIRED has identified at least half a dozen OpIndia writers, columnists, and editors, including editor in chief Nupur Sharma, who has more than 680,000 followers, who appear to be subscribed to X Premium.

Sharma did not respond to a question about OpIndia monetizing its content via X Premium, and the company itself also failed to respond.

“It’s a hyper-partisan, right-wing outlet that set themselves up by saying that mainstream news media in India have a liberal bias, very similar to what American right-wing outlets say about professional journalism in America,” says Kalyani Chadha, an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University who published an in-depth report in 2020 on India’s right-wing media ecosystem that included OpIndia. “They bill themselves as a news outlet, but there's not a lot of original reporting. A lot of it is commentary and opinion.”

In addition to Sinha and Zubair, OpIndia has regularly targeted journalists and outlets it sees as “far left.” In one piece, the site’s staff listed the Indian journalists and publications supposedly associated with billionaire George Soros, who has long been the target of conspiracies from the global far right. In another, they attacked veteran journalist Ravish Kumar, falsely accusing him of harboring sympathies for the perpetrators of a 2019 rape case. OpIndia has also spent years attacking Raqib Hameed Naik, an Indian journalist and the founder of India Hate Lab, which documents instances of hate speech and conspiracies that target India’s minority communities. This, he says, was made all the harder by government officials sharing the articles.

“The goal is to amplify this disinformation, and you have BJP leaders sharing this, so people think it’s authentic,” says Naik. “In the long term, this kind of builds the case against a critic, a journalist, that this person is bad, because there is reporting against them.”

When WIRED contacted OpIndia for comment, Sharma responded to our emailed questions by posting her responses on X.

When asked about hate speech and disinformation on her site, Sharma wrote: “Our critics are mostly Islamists, Jihadis, Terrorists, Leftists and their sympathizers—like yourself. We don't particularly care about any of them.” She then added that “Islamophobia does not exist” and pointed to an OpIndia article that outlines her position. Sharma added that it was “none of your concern” when asked if OpIndia was funded by the BJP. Sharma’s post also tagged one of the authors of this story, who then faced a torrent of abuse from Sharma’s followers.

For years, activists and researchers have tried to highlight the problematic content published by OpIndia. A 2020 campaign from UK-based advocacy group Stop Funding Hate led to a number of advertisers removing their ads from the site. Google, however, says the content published on the site does not appear to breach its own rules.

"All sites in our network, including Opindia, must adhere to our publisher policies, which explicitly prohibit ads from appearing alongside content promoting hate speech, violence, or demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in an election,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman says. “Publishers are also subject to regular reviews, and we actively block or remove ads from any violating content."

Despite this, users can find ads for Temu or the Palm Beach Post next to many OpIndia articles promoting conspiracies and Islamophobia, placed with the help of ad-exchange platforms like Google’s Ad Manager, which is the market leader.

Facebook, meanwhile, says Wiley, is more of a “walled garden.” Once a publisher meets the company’s criteria for monetization, including having more than 1,000 followers, it can earn money from ads that run on the page.

While researchers that spoke to WIRED were unable to tell exactly how much the site has made from Google Ads and Facebook monetization, they said it’s likely that OpIndia is not solely reliant on the ad exchange for its revenue. It appears that, as with many news outlets in India, part of that funding comes in the form of more traditional advertising from a major client: the government.

“A large section of India's mainstream press depends on the government ads for their survival,” says Prashanth Bhat, professor of media studies at the University of Houston. “That revenue is critical for the mainstream media survival in a hypercompetitive media environment like in India. We have about 400 round-the-clock television news channels in India in different languages, and we have over 10,000 registered newspapers. For them to survive, they definitely need government patronage.”

Sharma confirmed that OpIndia is reliant in part on ads from the government. “Literally every media house gets advertising from various political parties,” said Sharma. “In fact, a part of your salary could also be funded by such parties and/or their sympathizers. Do get down from your high horse.”

The BJP has, however, also sought to help OpIndia in other ways. In 2019, the BJP reached out to Meta directly, asking the company to allow OpIndia to monetize on Facebook. Meta spokesperson McPike told WIRED that OpIndia’s English page is still able to monetize but that monetization on its Hindi page is currently not allowed “due to violations of our policies.”

“In order to monetize on Facebook, Pages must comply with our community standards, our partner monetization policies, and our content monetization policies,” McPike says.

Google did not respond to questions from WIRED about whether it had ever received a similar request from the Indian government. Google’s Aciman says, “As we do with all publishers, we’ve taken prior page-level enforcement action on this site when we’ve found policy violations. We will of course continue to enforce our policies on violating content across our publisher network.”

X did not respond to questions about whether OpIndia and its staff are able to monetize through X Premium or whether the company has ever received requests from the government to restore content from OpIndia or its staff. The company has complied with several takedown requests from the Indian government to ban accounts or tweets critical of the government.

But Wiley says that without transparency on the part of tech companies as to how they’re deciding which organizations are able to earn money through ads—and how much—outlets like OpIndia will continue to fall through the cracks.

“The business model of the internet at the end of the day is advertising, and what we're seeing over and over again is, that business model is broken,” she says. “Advertisers don't know where their money is going. And the biggest issue is that a lot of that is being funneled to mis- and disinformation online.”

[hindulivesmatter]

Lol you LITERALLY have posts that frame "love jihad," aka Hindu and Muslim intermarriage, is somehow a "crime against Hindus." What a fucking joke. WE'RE ON TO YOU.

You're the same anon that sent me the longest rant ever at midnight. But whatever.

I don't have a problem with Hindu girls marrying Muslim men. It’s their choice but we can’t deny the fact that 99% of all Muslim-Hindu marriages end up in the Hindu having to change his or her religion to marry the Muslim.

Not to mention cases where the man changes his name to a Hindu name, romances the girl, and after marrying her forces her to convert or rapes her.

You people fucking exhaust me. Your constant denial of this is admirable. I'm sick of you denying the abductions and killings of Hindu girls and saying it's Islamophobic if you point it out. So yeah, fuck you.

[yourlocalarabgirlie]

This is absolutely disturbing and disgusting. The fact this is permissible in public and being allowed to be showcased infront of kids is beyond repulsive. The monsters pushing this and everyone involved SHOULD BE IN JAIL! there is no question about it, this is grooming and child abuse. This won an award, I am losing hope for this country. What else are we going to normalize, rape? Because we are on the verge of normalizing pedophillia.

Children should be allowed to be kids and play in playgrounds with other kids and live out their childhood while learning about math, reading, writing, etc in schools. They should NEVER be exposed to such sexual acts and be taught about gender and pride in schools. Kids are very impressionable, and pushing this agenda unto them will confuse them and desensitize them at a very young age. This is very heartbreaking and I also blame the parents for not protecting and standing up for their children. Pride month should be banned, I don't understand why people need a separate month so they can openly celebrate their kinks and fetishes. That stuff should be personal and be left at home, not be imposed on kids

[westeroswisdom]

Not sure if autocorrect was at fault or if this was a Freudian slip. 🫣

On May 7, United Nations’ Geneva office made an embarrassing goof-up while calling for peace and silencing the guns. In a tweet, they wrote, “We want peace. Silence the guns”, followed by the hashtags #StopWar and #IncestInPeace. However, the use of the word “Incest” (Archive link) created a tsunami of memes and jokes across social media.

This certainly reminded people of certain Westerosi twins. 

[curtwilde]

i hope bangdleshi hindus will filed lawsuit against opindia for misinformation

Don't get me wrong here, but a lot of the violence against Bangladeshi Hindus did happen. It doesn't matter who did it, but the fact remains that it happened and the army and interim government failed to protect its minorities, despite its promises. I have seen enough video evidence from sources I trust + first hand accounts from people I know personally. Rahul Anand and Ritwik Ghatak's homes were set on fire just because of their names and religious identities, despite everything they have done for their country. Many hindu citizens are still filed as missing (and are probably dead). Many others came over to Kolkata here temporarily, because religious zealots are everywhere regardless of religion, and throughout the history of Bangladesh Hindus have always been the first victims whenever any political upheaval has wrecked the country, regardless of whether they have a political interest or not.

Sanghi media took advantage of the situation for their own hindu fundamentalist agendas, it is true, and in many cases circulated misinformation and videos from other conflicts as violence against Bangladeshi Hindus. The best we can do is report these articles whenever we come across them, as I have done. But that does not erase the truth of persecution of Bangladeshi Hindus.

Religion and religious fundamentalism has destroyed this subcontinent from the inside but if we are to keep some hope in ourselves and keep on living, we must stand against it whenever we come across, regardless of religion.

Fortunately, just like here in India as I and many others will do for our Muslim friends, there are many, many Muslim citizens in Bangladesh who will lay their lives down to protect their Hindu brothers and sisters, and I can only hope that we will always outnumer the fundamentalists and extremists by far.

[nando161mando]

'On April 24, OpIndia carried a story claiming to expose Shaikh’s “disturbing social media behaviour”.

It accused her of being a “Hamas-sympathiser”, “anti-Hindu” and a supporter of “Islamist Umar Khalid” based on posts that she had “liked” from her Twitter account.'

[timetravellingkitty]

also no citing opindia or swarajya on this blog you might as well admit that you don't know what you're talking about

[mariacallous]

With millions of people voting in India’s General Election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeking a third term in office, and are widely tipped to get it. The Hindu nationalist movement in India predates Modi and the BJP but their decade in power has catapulted Hindu nationalism into the mainstream. 

Modi’s rise to power has reshaped India including the landscape for foreign funded organisations and media. Many human rights groups, journalists and activists critical of the government have come under intense scrutiny. A direct outcome has been the suspension or cancellation of their licences under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) which permits non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to receive funds from abroad. 

In the past nine years more than 16,000 NGOs have had their FCRA registration cancelled due to “violations” according to, national daily The Hindu, including those working on rights of India’s most vulnerable minority groups. 

Aakar Patel the former head of Amnesty International India – which was forced to halt operations in 2020 due to allegations of FCRA violations- told Bellingcat, “I think India should do away with a law that is used maliciously in a targeted fashion. There is no reason for one part of the private sector to be governed by a special law that the rest of the private sector is not subject to. And it is the government that decides, arbitrarily, what activity and which entity should submit itself to FCRA.” 

However, some media outlets that have thrived in the Modi-era, with content promoting Hindu nationalism and vilifying minority groups, are in fact receiving foreign donations or operating in ways that may be inconsistent with Indian laws. Bellingcat identified two such far-right outlets–OpIndia and Hindu Existence. We also found two other outlets receiving donations in ways that lack transparency–and both of these sites have links to a RSS-affiliated organisation in the US. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) was founded in 1925 and is often described as a volunteer, “paramilitary” organisation accused of stoking riots against minority groups and carrying out assassinations plots.

[buttercuparry]

The development came days after the Somaiya management sought an explanation from Parveen Shaikh over a report published by OpIndia on April 24 that tracked the Islamist views of the former principal and her bent towards anti-Indian elements on social media. She frequently liked Hamas pronouncements endorsing their ‘resistance’ against Israel along with those supporting its senior leadership such as terrorist Ismail Haniyeh. From her social media activity, she came across as an ardent advocate of Hamas who rationalised all the atrocities it commits as ‘resistance’ or ‘retaliation.’

But no sooner did OpIndia publish its first report detailing the problematic behaviour of the former Somaiya School principal, than a bevvy of left-leaning liberals and ultra-leftist propaganda portals, namely Scroll and The Wire, came to the defence of Ms Shaikh, using cliched tropes to downplay allegations against her and paint her as a victim of “online bullying and trolling.”

Reports published by Scroll and The Wire described OpIndia as a ‘Hindutva portal’ in a bid to discredit the serious allegations levelled against Ms Shaikh, an educator who was tasked with the responsibility of managing one of the notable knowledge centres in the country’s finance capital. 

These portals then went on to invoke the time-tested formula that leftists often resort to when they are boxed into a corner and find themselves entangled in a situation from which extrication is almost impossible: feign victimhood. These portals claimed Ms Shaikh supported Palestinians against the bloody war inflicted upon them by Israel. 

However, as is their wont, they remain economical with the truth and don’t hesitate to peddle lies if it comply with their agenda. They would either not mention the trigger that compelled Israel to mount an unprecedented attack against Gaza or allude to it as a passing reference. Even worse, they would conveniently distort support for Hamas as solidarity for Palestinians and condemnation of Hamas for the October 7 attacks as grounds for rationalising the aggression of “occupying force”, which they use for Israel, depending upon whether they want to protect one of them or peddle propaganda against their opponents. 

Since it was to protect Ms Shaikh in this case, several leftwing trolls and portals such as Scroll and The Wire pulled out the victim card, asserting that Ms Shaikh was hounded for merely championing the Palestinian cause, and has now lost her job for expressing solidarity for the Palestinians who are at the receiving end of Israel-Hamas conflict. 

This, of course, is a straw man argument since the sacking of Parveen Shaikh is not about any ’cause’ but Islamofascism, a supranational Islamic fundamentalism epitomised by Hamas, whose central aim is to destroy Israel, the Jewish land, and create a Palestinian country in its stead

I hope everyone involved with this article (from OpIndia) gets back a thousandfold of what they sow.

[bollytollykolly]

Kuwait-based designer company slams Pakistanis for 'Sar Tan Se Juda' slogans against a girl wearing Arabic dress - OpIndia

https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiSGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm9waW5kaWEuY29tLzIwMjQvMDIva3V3YWl0LXBha2lzdGFuaXMtZHJlc3Mtc2FyLXRhbi1zZS1qdWRhL9IBAA?oc=5&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr