{"id":2380,"date":"2017-05-14T10:07:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-14T04:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.altnews.in\/english-clone-2026\/?p=2380"},"modified":"2017-05-14T11:34:31","modified_gmt":"2017-05-14T06:04:31","slug":"whos-behind-fake-news-site-hindutva-info-secret-popularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.altnews.in\/english-clone-2026\/whos-behind-fake-news-site-hindutva-info-secret-popularity\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s behind the fake news site Hindutva.info? What is the secret of its popularity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who passed off<\/a> a Mexican stabbing video as one of RSS member getting killed in Kerala? Hindutva.info<\/strong>. Who spread the fake propaganda that Ravish Kumar’s sister<\/a> has been suspended due to corruption charges? Hindutva.info<\/strong>. Who pushed the false rumour<\/a> that there’s been a fatwa against Zee News’s Rohit Sardana? Hindutva.info<\/strong>. Who promoted a Bangladeshi video<\/a> as a Hindu being killed by Muslims in West Bengal? Hindutva.info<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Hindutva.info is the mother hen of all fake websites. The reach they have is phenomenal. At the time of writing, Hindutva.info’s traffic rankings according to Alexa is 1,229<\/a> in India. As compared to that, thewire.in has a ranking of 1,885<\/a> in India. Alexa, an Amazon.com subsidiary, is a commercial web traffic data and analytics company.<\/p>\n

\"TheWire.in<\/p>\n

While there are other suspect websites like postcard.news which are more popular<\/a> than Hindutva.info in terms of actual volume of traffic, I personally consider Hindutva.info the most dangerous because the content that they serve is in Hindi which reaches the masses in villages and small towns. As is often the case with such websites, the identity of who owns the website is hidden. Hindutva.info’s ‘About Us<\/a>‘ page reveals nothing about who runs the website. At Alt News, we recently did a detailed investigation<\/a> of DainikBharat.org which is yet another popular fake news site and we revealed who runs the show. By the end of this post, we will not only know who runs Hindutva.info but we will also find out what is the secret sauce that is used to make Hindutva.info’s content go viral. Along the way, we will also explain the methodology that we used to investigate.<\/p>\n

In case of DainikBharat.org<\/a>, the WHOIS information which can potentially reveal name, address, phone number etc of the domain owner was public when we investigated the site. It helped us find the initial clue which was their phone number. However, in case of Hindutva.info, the WHOIS information (https:\/\/www.whois.com\/whois\/hindutva.info<\/a>) is also well hidden using a paid service called ‘Domains By Proxy<\/a>‘. The name, address, phone number etc, as seen in the image below, is that of the company ‘Domains by Proxy’, and not Hindutva.info. The only thing we know is that the domain itself was registered on 18th August, 2015.<\/p>\n

\"Hindutva.info<\/p>\n

\"Hindutva.info<\/p>\n

Typically, with such websites, in their initial days of existence, they tend to reveal much more personal information than they do once they become popular. A service called Wayback Machine<\/a> helps us see what the websites looked like at various points of time in the past. They take regular, automated screenshots of almost all websites on the internet. We look a September 11, 2015, snapshot of Hindutva.info on Wayback Machine (http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20151109010752\/http:\/\/hindutva.info:80\/<\/a>) which is just a month after the registration of the domain name.<\/p>\n

\"September<\/p>\n

Circled above are the names of two of the authors on the website. In the initial version of the website, these two authors namely Vishal Kashyap<\/strong> and Jindal<\/strong> were the most prolific, a fact which will be evident if you scroll through the Wayback Machine link. All the English content was written by Vishal Kashyap while all the Hindi content was written by Jindal. We ran some searches of Vishal Kashyap and hindutva.info on Google but there was no information available which would suggest that Vishal Kashyap was the owner of hindutva.info. We looked at Jindal next.<\/p>\n

\"jindal<\/p>\n

So, there we have it! There’s a Rajesh Jindal who claims himself to be the founder of Hindutva.info on Quora (https:\/\/www.quora.com\/profile\/Jindal-Rajesh<\/a>) and LinkedIn (https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/rajesh-jindal-2b623933\/<\/a>). Let me also briefly explain the ‘site:<\/strong>‘ operator used above. It is a feature offered by Google Search wherein if you wish to search a specific site, lets say you want to search only hindutva.info and no other site, then you can add “site:hindutva.info” to your search query. However, if you wish to filter out all the results coming from one particular site then you preface the ‘site:<\/strong>‘ operator with a minus sign => ‘-site:<\/strong>‘. In the search query above, I wanted to filter out all the content from hindutva.info website as it is much more likely that I would find personally identifiable information of Mr Jindal on websites other than hindutva.info. Hence, the search operator ‘-site:hindutva.info<\/strong>‘ has been employed. Google has documented their advanced search features here => http:\/\/bit.ly\/1kktu5l<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Rajesh<\/p>\n

\"Rajesh<\/p>\n

But, who is Rajesh Jindal? We turn yet again to Google to see if we can find some more information about Rajesh Jindal. We run a search with the full name and the ‘-site:<\/strong>‘ operator<\/a> that we used before. And…success! We now have Mr Rajesh Jindal on video! The video was found on a website called Blogscreed<\/a> which Mr Jindal is a co-founder of.<\/p>\n