All pictures from reddit.com.
Don't want to go through the entire article? Here's a summary: This analysis is the first in a series where we analyze some popular websites/facebook groups. Although we provide a lot of information in this article, we are primarily interested in the reliability and the legitimacy of portals when it comes to reporting news. Choose your news sources wisely! Company: DC Nepal Website: http://www.dcnepal.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dc.nepal Let’s look at the basic information about the website first. Please note that every fact listed in this review is publicly available information – the citations follow the article. Now let’s take a look at the traffic statistics of the website. DCNepal is ranked #33,107 globally. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and page views on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked #1. These numbers look great, right? Well, except when you look at how engaged visitors are, the analysis kind of changes. The bounce rate for this website is 71.20 % - as in 71.20 % of visitors navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate generally implies that the website isn’t effective in encouraging their visitors to continue with their visit. The following chart partially explains the high bounce rate. A lot of visitors who visit this website are directed here from their facebook page. The admins of their facebook page are pretty active and post upwards of a hundred posts daily. These guys are constantly updating their facebook news feed to cater to the needs of 1.5m fans, and updating and keeping up with their website. All this hard work must be worth it, right? Here are the traffic worth estimates: Not bad, right? A lot of the visitors landing on their website are directed there from their facebook page. We also looked at what kind of a reach their facebook page has. DC Nepal's facebook page is one of the most popular pages in Nepal with a following of 1.5 million people. It is also one of the fastest growing pages - the page has grown by 28 k in the last week 130 k in the last month. Here's a chart showing this growth in the number of fans over the last month. Our purpose in starting with the detailed analysis of the website/facebook group’s reach is to establish that these numbers are in fact important. 1.5 million people log into their facebook accounts (almost) everyday and consume part of their daily news from this website. The impact of this group is tremendous, and the moolah they take home for all their work isn’t bad either. This raises the obvious question – how trustworthy is their news? Here is what we found. We went on a finishing trip in DC Nepal’s facebook page. We didn’t have the time or energy to look at every news article published there, but we did peruse through quite a few of them. Among the articles we did look at, here are some observations: Clickbait factor: Very High The website’s design is atrocious, but that analysis is beyond the scope of this article. Every post on Dc Nepal’s facebook page leads you to their website. Almost every post claims to have a video that goes with the news. Half of them don’t have videos. What they do have is a youtube video-like thing that leads to an advertisement. Even the pages that do have videos have a giant block of ad first. Here's an example - we have adblocks installed in our browsers, so this doesn't give a full picture of the actual number of ads thrown at you. A lot of their facebook posts are images from Nepal. The facebook posts read “ Click on this link to view more images”. A third of the time there are no more images, only more ads. Their choices of titles are very click-baity too. We will let you look through their facebook page to look at all of them – some of them are outright hilarious. Here is an example. One may argue that that’s how the Internet is these days. You ought to lure in people some way, and a click-baity title is more effective than other methods. The DC Nepal people need to make money as well, so ads are their only way of doing so. It would be easy to look past that if they were actually doing service to the general populace with the news they report. 1) On Thursday evening, some intellectual from California contributed an article to the website claiming that there was a probability of an earthquake of magnitude 7. What he didn’t mention is that the probability was 0.0001% (according to the latest advisory from USGS). As is common with most news posted to this facebook page, most people didn’t read the article and were freaked out after seeing the headline. Few that did were enraged, and angry facebook comments started piling up. The article was removed soon after (before we got a chance to take a screenshot of the article). 2) The facebook page constantly publishes images that link to news articles from other parts of the world. These images are generally of volcanoes, landslides, destruction of physical property, etc. What they don’t mention in the headlines is location of the disaster – their headline in the last such article read “Destructive pictures of landslides”. At a time like this when there is so much uncertainty and fear instilled in people, these articles do a tremendous disservice to the general population. Here's another news article that is more than a month old. They just mention that a man was beaten to death. They don't mention the location or the date of the incident. Well, let's click on the link and figure out exactly what happened. This is what the link leads to: We won't comment on the sheer ridiculousness of this situation. They do have what looks like a video right under this gibberish (well, gibberish to most Nepali people). Here is what it looks like: Click on it and where does it lead to? The same gibberish from earlier! Now, we don't want to make any assumptions, but it is fairly clear that the purpose of this news article is to rile people up.
Our verdict: UNFOLLOW DCNEPAL ! This isn’t the worst site on the web at the moment and there’s some useful information , but it’s just a baffling shame that users need to scroll past numerous pieces of ads to get there. The clickbaity titles and fake images are clearly intended to rile people up and instill fear in them. Lastly, and more importantly, it is absolutely despicable that a page with a following of 1.5 million publishes baseless rumors about the earthquake. It's an ignominy that these people make the money the do by providing such disservice to the general population. The website stats are from alexa.com and siteworthtraffic.com. The facebook stats are from socialbakers.com. Want any news article/news source fact-checked? Send us a message! A list of websites and facebook pages that fail our fact-check tests. We are continually fact-checking several other portals. If you find unverified news, baseless claims, or straight up false rumors, send us a message. Together we can ensure that the right information gets to the public.
हाम्रो तथ्य जांच प्रक्रियामा यी विभिन्न फेसबुक पेज तथा वेबइटहरुले श्रोत र आधार बिहिन समाचार छापेको भेट्यौ. हामी निरन्तर रूपमा अरु वेबसाइट र फेसबुक ग्रुप जाचिरहेका छौं. तपाईंले अप्रमाणित समाचार , आधारहीन दावा , वा झूटा अफवाहहरु भेट्नु भो भने हामीलाई मेसेज गर्नुहोस . हामी सबै संगै मिलेर सही जानकारीको प्रेषण सुनिश्चित गर्न सक्छौं। Quake Update. The following infographic published by ICIMOD provides great information on impact, relief and several other things.
Link to the image: http://goo.gl/FvYGDi Ask factcheck: air tickets for free for Nepali migrant workers who have lost family members5/16/2015 A fellow Nepali asked us to fact-check this news article: https://goo.gl/Zv2fyA
We got in touch with Minendra Rijal, the Minister of Information and Communication, who verified that this news, is in fact, TRUE. (See the twitter conversation below) The gist: The government has decided to arrange two-way air tickets for free for Nepali migrant workers who have lost family members in their home districts in the big earthquake. A Cabinet meeting on Thursday decided to bear the cost of two-way air tickets for the bereaved citizens if they wish to return to the country by mid-June. “Government will arrange free tickets for citizens who have lost at least one member of their family in the quake,” said Minister for Information and Communications Minendra Rijal. However, the migrant workers have to meet certain criteria set by the government. The criteria are yet to be made public. Want any news articles fact-checked? Send us a facebook message. आज हामीलाई एक जाना नेपाली ले निम्नलिखित समाचार साँचो हो कि हैन भनेर बुझ्न सम्पर्क गर्नुभएको थियो. हामीले twitter मा सूचना तथा संचार मन्त्रि मिनेन्द्र रिजाल संग सम्पर्क गर्यौ. यो खबर साँचो रहेछ. https://goo.gl/Zv2fyA There have been a lot of rumors circulating about countries, celebrities, organizations, and others making donations. According to UNOCHA, here is a list of total humanitarian funding per donor as of May 15, 2015. A comparison of the ten highest humanitarian donations: Here is a list of outstanding pledges in USD:
हाल सम्मको भूकम्पकको छ्यतिको अपडेट. हामि दिनहुँ अपडेट गरि रहने छौं. यहाँ उल्लेखित सबै समाचार नेपाली पुलिसको रिपोर्टमा आधारित छ.
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