Last week Instagram notified me that a viral post I had published was “fact checked” by a group called ‘The Healthy Indian Project’. My mother is from Bombay, and I did lose 40lbs last year, but I didn’t think they had created an entire unit just for me. So, I decided to find out who this group is. My findings are bemusing.
The Healthy Indian Project (‘THIP’) appears to have started as a fitness and lifestyle site in 2018. Its CEO – Sudipta Sengupta – is a life-long marketing consultant from a small city (Gurgaon, Haryana) in India.
The group is a member of the high-profile Poynter network called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), though a two separate audits of its membership reveal concerns about non-partisanship, transparency, and the organization’s finances with a particular focus on a grant from the U.S.-based search engine Google:
“The applicant has shared proof of its status as a legally registered company. It has provided a balance sheet that indicates that the funding comes from its directors. They have mentioned a grant from Google this does not reflect in the balance sheet, we do not know if it accounts for more than 5% of the revenue. The balance sheet does not reflect any income or expenses.”
– IFCN assessor Surekha Deepak.
The network was added to Facebook’s “fact-checking” program – which includes Instagram – in the summer of 2021.
The B.S. ‘Fact-Check’.
Here’s the context behind this investigation.
On February 6th, I shared a screenshot of a Paul Hsieh article from Forbes:
Originally entitled, “Could A ‘Morality Pill’ Help Stop The Covid-19 Pandemic?” the August 30th 2020 article discussed the “widespread administration of psychoactive drugs” that “could provide ‘moral enhancement’ that would make people more likely to adhere to social norms such as wearing masks and adhering to social distancing guidelines.”
In other words, Huxley’s Soma.
My highlighting of the article and its contents even garnered a retweet from current media ‘bad boy’ Joe Rogan, causing author Hsieh and outlet Forbes to both alter the headline and attach an amendment to the article insisting that Hsieh was not in favor of the “morality pill.”
But whether or not the author was in favor of the pill was not the point of my posts. I couldn’t care less what Hsieh’s position on the matter is. I care about the fact this is being discussed, or developed. Spreading the word was a way to warn people about this pill, not the opinion of some radiologist with 2,000 Twitter followers.
Regardless, the “fact check” article of my post is headlined: “Fact Check: Does Forbes’ article suggest the ‘morality pill’ to stop the COVID-19 pandemic?”
Story cited here.
