Nl interview with zubair: ‘they said india is so poor, why would anyone donate to you for fact-checking? ’

Nl interview with zubair: ‘they said india is so poor, why would anyone donate to you for fact-checking? ’


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In Sitapur, they asked me why I didn’t tweet _Bajrang Muni’s apology_? That I only tweeted his rape threat but not the apology video he tweeted hours after the police had filed a case


against him. I was like why should I? His video didn’t appear like an apology to me and it’s no excuse. They were very shocked that out of 15 employees, _Alt News_ has only three Muslims on


its team, including me. They wanted me to name all the employees, so I named them. At least two or three of them were shocked that almost all of them were Hindus– "_Tum Hindu hoke_, you


write against Hindus". I said we don’t do that…we only write against people who spread misinformation. Moreover, most of our donors are Hindus. In the Delhi case, I explained how I


only tweeted _a movie scene_ and there are examples of supporters of the government who tweeted the same image. They didn’t like the fact that I mentioned 2014. Soon after, they too switched


to _Alt News_ funding…but this has been my experience in all the previous cases too. The line of questioning is about _Alt News_ funding. They showed me the donor list. Asked me why people


would donate 40,000 or so. They were actually pretty nice to me but I was a bit shocked at the Patiala court when they accused us of getting foreign funding…and that I was directly getting


money in my account. Though I think they were convinced during the questioning that whatever money we received was through Indian accounts. Be it on Razorpay or Instamojo, you can’t enter


foreign cards.