Zindabad to everyone willing to fight the good fight

Why read this story?

Editor's note: I feel both debilitatingly paralyzed as well as flushed with inspiration as I begin to type this month’s newsletter. I have only Mohammed Zubair on my mind. The 39-year-old Bengaluru resident and co-founder of India’s top fact-checking website Alt News has been relentless at using his digital forensics skills to debunk unscientific myths and disinformation about current news, religion and caste. He has half a million followers on Twitter. His tweets, targeting fake news and setting the record straight with facts, receive thousands of retweets. Zubair hasn’t tweeted for nearly three weeks now. He was summoned by the Delhi police in mid-June for a case in which he had been granted anticipatory bail. In Delhi, he was arrested on a flimsy case involving a tweet from four years ago, and is being shuttled continuously between police stations in small towns of Uttar Pradesh and courts where he is denied bail. He is now spending his third week in prison. Yet, it is impossible to think of the incarceration of Zubair as a standalone case. Reflecting on the extraordinary injustice and …