Kunal Kamra has been pretty active on YouTube this year. The comedian put out a comedy special, hosted a series titled Report Card leading up to this year’s general elections and released a documentary The Free Market highlighting the challenges of the gig economy in the country. And now, with yesterday’s upload, he has resurrected his podcast Shut Up Ya Kunal. In the episode, Kamra is joined by Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha, the founders of the non-profit fact-checking website Alt News.

In the first episode to come out in over a year, Zubair and Sinha—two former software engineers—tell Kamra about the motivation and inception of the company that was launched in February 2019 to combat the spread of fake news. While discussing the history of the company, the trio also discuss the information consumption patterns of the Indian electorate and touch upon some of the controversies they have found themselves at the centre of.

Kamra also hailed a significant victory for free speech in September this year when the Bombay High Court ruled against the amended Information Technology Rules (2021). With these amendments, the central government was trying to set up a fact-checking unit to identify fake, false and misleading information about itself on social media. Kamra was one of the petitioners who approached the court last April, calling them “a direct assault by the respondent authorities on freedom of thought, speech and expression.”