Helo Forges Alliance with Alt News in Fight Against Fake News

Helo announces that it has partnered with Alt News, a leading non-partisan fact-checking partner authority, as part of its ongoing fight against fake news.

This partnership involves a series of training sessions conducted by Alt News to equip Helo’s local content moderation team with their proprietary tools and methodology to identify and mitigate the threat of content from unverified sources. The first training session was held earlier this week at the Helo headquarters in Delhi NCR and was conducted by Alt News Co-Founder, Pratik Sinha.

This strategic partnership is in line with Helo’s commitment to create a safe environment for the exchange of perspectives and information, given the personalized, localized vernacular content on its platform. Available in 14 vernaculars including Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and more, Helo bridges the information gap for Indians nationwide, narrowing the digital divide for the larger population communicating in their mother tongues.

“At Helo, we take issues such as misinformation and fake news very seriously. This is why we’re honoured to partner with Alt News, a renowned fact-checking authority, to ensure that our platform continues to be a safe and viable source of the latest news and trending topics,” said Shayamanga Barooah, Head of Content Operations, Helo.

“We are committed to integrating Alt News’ tools and methodology into our world-class content moderation system, which is powered by our advanced machine learning algorithms and supported by a local content moderation team covering the 14 languages that we have on our platform,” he added.

“We’re looking forward to working with Helo in ensuring that Indians nationwide can easily access information through credible sources that also allow them to better express themselves in their native language,” said Pratik Sinha, Co-Founder, Alt News. “Our training sessions and knowledge exchange underscore our commitment to transparency and our high editorial standards when it comes to addressing incorrect or dubious information.”

Apart from its sophisticated content moderation policies, Helo offers a variety of privacy features to protect content on the platform, ensuring the safety and security of all its users. Helo users can choose whether others can comment on or share their content, reducing risks of content infringement and ensuring that content remains only for personal consumption.

With over 25 million monthly active users nationwide, Helo’s AI-powered, visual platform is specifically designed for Indian mobile users. It enables users to easily create content with easy-to-use tools, and encourages interaction through features to make new friends, and share the latest and top trending jokes, memes, status updates, wishes, quotes, shayari and Bollywood news.

Helo crossed more than 1 million downloads within the very first month of its India launch in June 2018, and has been consistently ranked among the top free apps on the Google Play Store.