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AltNews Epic Fail: “Fact check” website gets fact-check wrong, tries to make it up, fails again

July 2, 2020
The Commune

AltNews, a propaganda vehicle masquerading as fact-check website failed miserably yet again for wrongly “fact-checking”.

In a recent article, the website sought to debunk a video of Apache helicopters flying over a lake that was widely circulated in social media.

The video is actually one that of an Apache flying over Lake Havasu in Arizona. While the article titled “Video of Apache helicopters flying over Lake Havasu in Arizona, US viral as Pangong, Ladakh” bust the fake news that was getting circulated as Apaches flying over Ladakh’s Pangong Tso, it miserably failed by wrongly attributing a Twitter user of peddling fake news.

The Twitter user Mihir Shah who is also a defence journalist and has his by-lines at Livefist (a top defence news portal), Newslaundry and Swarajya had in his Twitter sarcastically remarked “The Indian Navy’s Sea King helicopters with mast-mounted sonars conducting anti-submarine operations at Pangong Tso”.

Clearly the defence journalist was making a sarcastic remark by saying “anti-submarine operations in Pangong Tso”.

However, the writers at Alt News failed to differentiate between good humour sarcasm and fake news and misattributed Mihir Shah as a peddler of fake news.

Well, you know what they say about sarcasm. If you don’t, click here.

Also, AltNews in their article mentioned that Apache helicopters in the video are black in colour. However, Mihir Shah pointed out that American helicopters are acutally dark green.

No. It doesn’t stop there. They go on to claim that “a roundel identifies that the vessel belongs to IAF” and this input they claim to have received it from a “serving IAF officer”.

However, this fact-check too turned out wrong.

The fact checking website came out with a clarification that read “Mihir Shah who is an aviation writer and a contributor to Livefest, clarified that his post was sarcastic. However, since it was one of the earliest tweets mentioning Pangong Tao, it led to false calims”

There are two spelling errors in the above tweet. They got the name of Livefist wrong. Instead of Livefist, the AltNews clarification read “Livefest”.

They also mentioned Pangong Tso lake as Pangong “Tao”.

AltNews badly needs to spell-check before it goes about fact-checks!