Fake News and Propaganda: Fake incidents on social media maligning the Value of Farmers Protest

Do you think social media is the place where you prefer to get all your news and updates? Do you read the WhatsApp messages, tweets, or Facebook posts of any person and show trust in them and start believing whatever is written. Well, don’t worry, and don’t feel alone because you are not the only one doing it. But there are a lot of people who are doing it (trusting random social media messages without a fact check) is a problem. Social media is a place for people to be expressive of their thoughts and opinions. But over a period of time, what it has become is a place, where people say whatever they want to say, with no facts validating their points and thousands of people sharing that baseless and factless argument, setting propaganda and false information, with no scope of factuality. Well, this is how it has become and we can evidently see the traces of it in the farmers’ protest that has been in the national news for a few days now.

With the ‘Delhi Chalo’ protest that is curtailing amid the pandemic where the farmers are protesting against Farm Bills, there are plenty of videos, photos, and information circulating on social media, which have told you things about a few things about farmers’ protest which are baseless and not true, here are the instances –

1. Kangana Ranaut Said, Shaheen Bagh’s Bilkis Dadi was at the protest when she was not

Kangana retweeted a post by a Twitter user, where Bilkis dadi’s photograph was kept adjacent to another woman, who looks quite similar to Bilkis Bano, captioned as “Dadi at Shaheen Bagh, Dadi as a farmer?”.  Kangana shared it saying “Ha ha ha, she is the same dadi who featured in Time magazine for being the most powerful Indian… And she is available for 100 rupees. Pakistani journos have hijacked international PR for India in an embarrassing way. We need our own people to speak for us internationally,” and later deleted the tweet. Banno said that she was at home, though on Tuesday, she eventually made a move to join the protest. Well, this morning, reports are so that Kangana might end up in legal trouble for her comments.

2. Fake News: Pro-Pak Slogans at ‘Delhi Chalo’ Protests?

It is not the first time when protesting farmers have been called Khalistanis, but this video had crossed the bar. A video about a man raising pro-Khalistan and Pakistani slogans at a protest got viral and BJP leader, Priti Gandhi retweeted it saying  “Raising pro-Khalistan slogans and holding Pakistan flags at a #FarmersProtest?? Are these really farmers?? (sic)” Well, this video got viral extensively but has now been deleted.

3. Images claiming Protestors Blocking The Roads Is Not From Delhi Chalo Protest

A thing about the protest is it looks like a crowd, and one could barely identify or differentiate between two crowds. Mumbai Live news shared two images recently, stating that the farmers are blocking the road, but later, it came out that the images were of a protest that happened in 2018, in Mumbai, Thane. But who cares, the fake news became viral now.

4. A Muslim Man Impersonating as a Sikh Man? a) It Didn’t Happen, b) does that matter?

A video was floating on social media got viral where a cop takes off a man’s turban, forcibly, reasoning misleading claims about the religion of the man. The claim here was that the Muslim man dressed up as Sikh with an intent to incite violence got viral and guess what, who retweeted it? The Union Minister, Giriraj Singh. Well, fake news does travel fast. Later, it came out that the video was of 2011 in Mohali.

Well, these are just a few of them, and social media is literally full of them. So, be brainy and use your eagle eyes before trusting anything on social media and becoming part of the propaganda.

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