About

I'm Pratik Sinha. I work at the intersection of journalism, technology, and power -- though those categories have always felt insufficient for what I actually do.

I co-founded Alt News in 2017, which is one part of my work. But the questions that occupy me go beyond any single organisation. They are about the information ecosystem itself: how it broke, who benefits from it being broken, and what it would take to build something better.

What I'm thinking about

The internet was supposed to democratise information. Instead it concentrated it. A small number of platforms now control what most of the world reads, sees, and understands -- not through conspiracy but through the ordinary logic of capital seeking scale. The result is an ecosystem optimised for engagement, which turns out to mean an ecosystem optimised for outrage, fear, and division.

Fact-checking is a response to the symptoms of this. I'm more interested in the disease. The infrastructure of the internet -- the DNS system, the platform layer, the advertising economy that funds it -- is not neutral. It was built by specific people with specific interests, and it reflects those interests. The question of what a genuinely public, accountable information infrastructure would look like is one I keep returning to.

In India, these questions have a particular urgency. The information ecosystem here is not just broken in the generic sense -- it is actively weaponised. Disinformation, hate speech, and communal polarisation are not accidents. They are produced, distributed, and amplified by identifiable actors using identifiable infrastructure. Understanding that infrastructure, and building alternatives to it, is a long-term project.

What I'm working on

Alongside Alt News, I'm working on questions of digital sovereignty and decentralised infrastructure -- what it means for journalists, activists, and civil society organisations to control their own tools and data rather than depending on platforms that can be pressured, censored, or simply shut down. This includes self-hosted software, federated protocols, and community-governed networks.

I'm also writing -- slowly, iteratively -- about two decades of watching the Indian internet change. About what we lost, what we misunderstood, and what might still be possible.

This site

This is where I think out loud. Some of it will be carefully argued essays. Some will be shorter, half-formed thoughts. All of it is written under CC BY-SA 4.0 -- share it, adapt it, keep it open.

Contact

The links in the footer work. For Alt News specifically, use altnews.in.