Misinformation Combat Alliance made fact-checking a coalition in India

In India, election periods brought a surge of misinformation, while health, climate, financial, and education claims created a wider information crisis. Synthetic media and deepfakes raised the stakes for identity and safety.

Bharat Gupta and nine other founders started the nonprofit MCA in January 2022. The decision was to organize fact-checking organizations, media companies, and civic technology around a collaborative, nonpartisan framework rather than rely on a single platform.

The coalition then joined forces with Google and Meta: it became part of Meta’s Deepfakes Analysis Unit and helped launch a multilingual WhatsApp helpline for real-time exchanges. By May 2024, MCA included 12 fact-checking organizations, three media companies, and a civic-tech organization.

MCA grew to 12 fact-checking organizations, three media companies, and a civic-tech organization, then partnered with Google and Meta on multilingual interventions.

Misinformation is cross-platform, so isolated fact-checkers cannot reach the whole audience.

The alliance pooled specialist organizations while keeping IFCN principles as a membership standard.

Google and Meta supplied major distribution channels, including a multilingual WhatsApp helpline.

When a problem spreads across platforms and languages, a standards-based coalition can pool trust, specialist capacity, and distribution instead of asking one actor to police the whole system.

MCA kept membership free and open to organizations willing to fight misinformation, while annual checks against IFCN principles were used to protect nonpartisanship. Its platform partnerships moved the work from standalone fact checks toward scaled, real-time interventions.