The Fauxy’s Mail To The Print Leaked

Yesterday, The Print published an article on RW satire websites and the growing appetite for satire among the public. However, the article displayed a clear bias with its writer finding it difficult to differentiate between satire and fake news.

BJP supporters have a secret weapon in their online poll campaign — satire

The article reiterates that it’s based on the replies that The Fauxy has given to The Print which is not entirely true. This might be one of the reasons that a rebellious employee from The Fauxy went on to leak the real e-mail.

Read below the complete mail.
From: The Fauxy
To: The Print

Hi ➖➖➖,

Thank you for showing interest in The Fauxy. Please find our replies inline to your questions.

The Print: What year/month did The Fauxy launch? and what was the purpose of launching the site?

The Fauxy: The Fauxy was launched in July 2018 with the sole purpose of crushing stereotypes in a humorous and satirical way. But with the fast-growing reach of the website, we improvised according to what fits best to the needs of our audience. Our team understands our responsibility to our readers and decided to extend The Fauxy’s horizon to serious topics which are not much talked about, like say social practices or politics. We aim to start a conversation around subjects that are usually viewed as a taboo for today’s youth so that we can contribute to an actual positive change in society.

The Print: Is it possible to know more about the team behind the site? such as how many team members write for the platform, are they based in India/state or outside India, and who takes editorial decisions?

The Fauxy: There are 1.25 billion people behind the site and you too can be a part of it. Yes, The Fauxy’s content is driven by its audience and anyone can submit their articles/ideas which can then get published after proper review by a team of four volunteers who are also the founders of the website.

The Print: Is it possible to know what have been your most popular/most read article? Is it possible to know how many visitors the site gets? Has traffic to site grown since launching?

The Fauxy: The website has seen unprecedented growth since its first week with some of its articles crossing the million mark. Currently, the average reach per article is around 10k. As it turns out, one of our most appreciated and read articles is co-incidentally about your website.

https://thefauxy.com/man-takes-print-out-of-theprintindia-%e2%80%acarticles-to-wrap-samosa-on-them/

The Print: How would you describe The Fauxy’s style of satire compared to perhaps other popular sites like Unreal Times or Faking Post?

The Fauxy: The Fauxy has a clear stand and isn’t ready to bow down to any ecosystem. From the very start, we have been clear – “We shall make our own audience”!
We sensed an evolving readership that wants to know stuff but wants it to be served to them with a funny yet informative take. That has been the core idea behind every article we feature on our website.
The Fauxy is honest and brutal with its sense of sarcasm and satire whereas the above-mentioned websites mostly play around with light satire and humour. Faking News is a pioneer in this field but hasn’t seen much competition, until now. We feel that a competitive environment is required for websites to come up with great ideas and compel one another to perform better. The ultimate beneficiary is the audience who get to read more intelligent and humorous content.

The Print: Do you feel like political satire and parody news has lost its charm and appeal because fake news has become widespread and has had a negative impact on India?

The Fauxy: If you observe carefully fake news is based on hatred and animosity whereas satire articles are mostly an extrapolation/exaggeration of whatever is happening in the society. Satire does not intend to hurt anybody. The sole objective is to tickle some bones yet evoke the thought process of the reader. Fake news is, however, is neither funny nor intelligent by any stretch of the imagination and can, in fact, be fatally misleading.
Also, we feel that holding the presumption that the audience gets confused between satirical humour and real news, in our opinion, is nothing but belittling their intelligence.

The Print: In the age of social media do you feel the content published as political satire by various public figures, entertainers, and social media accounts could possibly be aimed at offending or slandering others rather than commenting on social or political issues that need to be addressed?

The Fauxy: We don’t think public figures need to resort to satirical articles to offend someone since the mainstream media itself is doing this job well. There are several news portals which quite frequently post their personal opinion/ideology as a news piece and given how intelligent we consider today’s reader to be, it’s not difficult for them to sense the malice behind it. Each article of The Fauxy carries a bold disclaimer on the bottom of the page. We feel that should be the norm for mainstream media houses as well since they have been doing less reporting and more speculation. We feel mainstream media should stop pushing or spoon feeding a reader and let them develop their own stand on any issue. As we mentioned earlier, we feel our readers are way too intelligent and do not need lessons on how to think.

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