Paperclip: Pinning down truth in the age of misinformation

Digital storytelling platform fights fake news by sharing captivating anecdotes and lesser-known facts about India’s diverse cultural heritage.

A collage of Paperclip stories. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

“Stay curious!” is the tagline that comes at the end of all posts by Paperclip, a digital media house dedicated to storytelling run by a team of seven operating out of multiple locations, from Chicago to Kolkata. The description on its website reads: “Through captivating storytelling, Paperclip aims to inform, engage and empower an inspired audience and deepen their awareness of India’s diverse social, cultural and democratic fabric. In the age of yellow journalism and fabricated content, Paperclip aims to become India’s most authentic and exciting storytelling medium.”

Going by the number of followers it has on social media—78K+ on X, 35K+ on Instagram, as I write—it appears to be getting there. Paperclip’s posts, packaged with visuals, audio, and text, are attractive and authentic, and belie the usual fear that facts and history are boring.

The Paperclip team as illustrated on the website. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024, India stands top in the list of countries threatened by misinformation and disinformation. It is in this context that entities like Paperclip, which try to challenge falsehoods, become important. Indranath Mukherjee, who handles Paperclip’s communication, engagement and marketing initiatives, says: “In the face of the ever-increasing spread of misinformation on social media, we wanted to play our part in setting the record straight, present facts without colouring them with subversive agenda, and let our readers/followers infer and form their own opinion.”

Paperclip takes care not to claim ownership of the stories, and cites sources at the end of its posts and threads. But there have been controversies nevertheless, with the online news website Scroll.in accusing it of having plagiarised Scroll’s stories on at least three occasions and another website accusing it of factual errors.

In response, Mukherjee says: “The utmost credit [for the stories] belongs to historians and researchers who meticulously document this knowledge. Our role is that of storytellers, translating vast amounts of information into accessible narratives for the masses in our signature, creative manner. Therefore, we prioritise citing our sources diligently, as they serve as the foundation of our storytelling, guiding interested readers to explore these sources further.... We also check multiple source materials to ensure reliability.... Despite this, there have been a few instances of factual errors, especially in our early days. We have always owned up [to] those errors or mistakes and immediately published a corrigendum across platforms.”

Some critics say that this may not be enough. Scroll editor Naresh Fernandes pointed out that their attributions come too low in the tweet thread to register with readers. This is likely to be a continuing irritant and a charge faced by other news-aggregating services as well.

Paperclip’s posts have been on a wide range of topics, ranging from Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, and Winston Churchill to Amar Singh Chamkila, Binaca Geetmala, Singer sewing machines, Boroline, Electral, and Tintin. They usually start each such thread with an intriguing query: Why does Churchill owe Rs.13 to a Bengaluru club? Why does Brazil have a school named after Tagore? What is Tipu Sultan’s sword made of? Sometimes, there are nested stories within stories, with each topic flagging off separate trains of related narratives. In the Tipu Sultan post, for example, there are references to the revolt of 1857, to a Walter Scott novel, to the 17th century Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci, and to Alexander the Great.

Topical posts

The stories are not just historical trivia but also have a connection to present-day realities. Take the story of the 1922 protest in the town of Chauri Chaura (now in Uttar Pradesh). When peasants from small towns and villages in the region had led a peaceful demonstration to voice their support for Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, they had been beaten up, restrained, and jailed by the local police force led by Gupteshwar Singh, a tyrannical inspector. In protest, people marched against the police on the streets of Chauri Chaura under the aegis of the retired soldier Bhagwan Ahir and the wrestler Nazar Ali on a chilly February morning in 1922. Ali was the local wrestling champion who had set up an akhada (wrestling academy) to train villagers. In his renowned akhada, Hindus and Muslims trained together to combat a common enemy: the British and their Indian satraps. Reading the post in today’s polarised India makes one connect many dots.

The Chauri Chaura post | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Finding stories that are timely and relevant involves a lot of research. How do they go about it?

Mukherjee says: “Our primary source is the accumulated knowledge within the team, the continuous consumption of books/magazines/journals (both offline and online), audio-visual content and, of course, our extensive travel experiences and conversations. This helps us discover interesting snippets and themes which we develop further.”

The Aaya Ram Gaya Ram post. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Paperclip’s posts are also a hit because they are topical. During the recent Lok Sabha election, they came up with the story behind the Hindi phrase Aaya Ram Gaya Ram (“Ram has come, Ram has gone”), which popularly refers to turncoats, who can be found in plenty in voting season.

According to Mukherjee: “Usually, for our threads on X or our posts on Instagram, we rely on secondary research. For the featured articles on our website or for commissioned work, we reach out to people relevant to the story. For instance, in an original feature story we did to document the Eden Garden Disaster of August 16, 1980, we interviewed numerous eyewitnesses for first-hand accounts.” This worked out into a chilling reconstruction of the mêlée that broke out during a football match of the rival clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal at the iconic sports stadium in Kolkata. It left 16 dead and countless injured. The story on Paperclip’s website is a detailed account of the famous Bengali football obsession.

Posts on football and Bengali culture

Football and Bengali culture are two clearly discernible threads in many posts. Paperclip’s all-Bengali core team, in fact, consists of friends who came together through “a shared love for football and storytelling”. That common passion led to the creation of Goalden Times, a blog that combined football stories with human interest angles. It was the predecessor to Paperclip, which was formally launched on August 15, 2021. As of now, the team has seven members: Indranath Mukherjee, Srinwantu Dey, and Trinanjan Chakraborty take care of the primary functions; Priyadarshini Basu and Saumyajit Ray edit and proofread all the content; and Abhinaba Maitra and Subhajit Sengupta handle the bulk of the research work. All of them hold day jobs, but they dream of a day in the near future when Paperclip can become their full-time occupation.

One of Paperclip’s outstanding stories was about Hamida Banu, a Muslim woman who made a significant impact on India’s wrestling scene in the 1940s and 1950s. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Paperclip’s reach is certainly increasing, what with its eye-catching Insta stories, video content, and the podcast series Long Story Short. Mukherjee says: “Our stories frequently circulate on platforms like WhatsApp and are often picked up by mainstream media. We believe such extraordinary true narratives will come to the forefront, overshadowing the fabricated content that is increasingly capturing space.”

One of their more successful stories was about Hamida Banu, a Muslim woman who made a significant impact on India’s wrestling scene in the 1940s and 1950s. Several media outlets, including the BBC, picked up the story. According to the BBC report, she is said to have challenged male wrestlers in 1954 by saying: “Beat me in a bout and I’ll marry you.” The Paperclip team decided to do the story after stumbling upon Banu’s blurry image in newspaper archives. They pieced together fragments of her life from newspaper articles and a visit to one of her relatives in Mumbai.”

Paperclip would like to specialise in such stories: chronicling individual lives and events that may not have been recorded in detail or may have slipped from public memory. And readers, in turn, seem to have an appetite for such anecdotes from the past: Paperclip’s thread on the pankha (fan) pullers of colonial times had nearly two million hits.

True to fact

It would not be far-fetched to say that Paperclip’s posts carry the hallmark of the “argumentative Indian” who is willing to endlessly debate topics over chai. The trait of arguing—which, in its noblest form, takes the form of intellectual debate and at its lowest, gossip—can also be considered a peculiarly Bengali passion. And some of Paperclip’s posts do have a distinctly Bengali flavour: there is a lot on Netaji, Durga Puja, Satyajit Ray, and on State passions like rum and Coke, phuchka (a Bengali snack), or Tintin.

A Paperclip post tracing the connection between Tintin and Kolkata’s twin city, Chandannagar, went viral. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

But they seem to touch a national chord. A post tracing the connection between the Belgian boy detective and Kolkata’s twin city, Chandannagar, went viral, with Bengalis super chuffed to have their generational friendship with Tintin reconfirmed. More importantly, Paperclip’s posts gesture to a liberal, multicultural, multilinguistic idea of India and push back against parochialism.

Paperclip is also an example of the unique ways in which storytelling, chronicling, and history writing are evolving for the digital generation. Mukherjee says: “Community engagement for us is not just about numbers but about fostering a deep connection with our audience. We cherish the engagements with our readers, who contribute fascinating anecdotes, personal experiences, and diverse perspectives, enriching the narratives. Community is at the heart of everything we do.”