Browser View | January 28, 2023

Good morning. On the 🗒️ menu this week, we have -

✅ Definition of middle class

✅ A Zomato 'Scam'

✅ Fake News around SRK's ‘Pathaan’ and much more. 

Lets begin!

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🔖 As fact-checkers, we face several dilemmas while verifying a piece of information. Some are editorial, some are ethical.

In this edition, I will discuss ethics in fact-checking.

Sometimes, the viral claims are so baseless or let's say it's like you know that this claim is false but you don't have enough evidence to prove it. What should you do in such a case?

I think one shouldn't publish it! A fact-check has to be watertight, it cannot leave readers with questions. Rather, it has to answer every relevant question possible.

Here's another situation—A lot of times, the claims play on our biases. For example, let's say I have presumed that the claim is true because I believe such a thing could happen/ has happened. This will hamper my research as I would be thinking only in one direction.

Hence, it's always good to be conscious about your biases before researching or verifying.

Takeaway: Be editorially AND ethically right!

✅ Misinformation This Week 

This week, we published a total of 15 fact-checks wherein BOOM’s Debraj Sarkar found that majority of the claims were from entertainment (28%) and political domains (22%).

Further, the long awaited release of SRK’s ‘Pathaan’ was a hot topic for false news makers, accounting for 17% of the total claims. Follow our Twitter thread to read the detailed analysis.

 📊 What Data Says About How Middle Class Is Defined In India

🔖 At a recent event, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that she identifies herself as 'middle class', to convey that she understands the pressures and problems they face.

But who falls under the middle class category? There is no fixed definition of who can be called economically middle class. Rather, there are several approaches to defining it—depending on the author—which can span across income brackets.

Read this explainer by Mohammed Kudrati to know more.

Read More

💸 Meanwhile, follow our 'Kambakht Paisa' series with Abhinav Trivedi to know more about Budget 2023.

🍕 Food Delivery Partners Are Scamming Zomato Using A Loophole 

🔖 When Vinay Sati, an entrepreneur from Uttarakhand, ordered food from Zomato a few days ago, he was told by the delivery agent while delivering his order how he could cheat and get his food at a much lower rate next time, if he uses the ‘cash on delivery’ (COD) option on order.

He took to LinkedIn to say that a 'scam' by food delivery agents might be causing a massive loss to Zomato.

So, what is this 'scam' really? BOOM's Kaisar Andrabi spoke to some delivery agents to understand.

Read More

🔖 A four-year old video showing a group of women coming out of a movie theater criticising the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer 'Zero', was peddled as moviegoers giving negative reviews to the actor's latest release 'Pathaan'. Read this fact-check by Anmol Alphonso.

Read More

🔖 Pakistan-Canadian columnist Tarek Fatah and other social media users shared a video of a young boy doing namaz on the road and claimed that the video is from Pakistan. BOOM's Hazel Gandhi found that the video is not from Pakistan.

Read More

🅱️ Recommends

🔖 This week's recommendation is: Populism and social media: how politicians spread a fragmented ideology by Sven Engesser, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser and Florin Buchel

It delves into the salient aspects of populist narrative by looking into cases from four countries. It studies the manufacturing of populist rhetoric by both sides of the political spectrum and delineates between left-leaning populism and right-leaning ones based on preferred targets; the right prefers attacking media and the left likes to target economic elites.

Read More

👩‍🏫 Workshops

🔖 Join our workshops and courses on Fact Checking & Media Literacy. Visit 🔗workshop.boomlive.in

Visit Now

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Verified By Boom is written by Divya Chandra, edited by Adrija Bose

and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

If you have suggestions about this newsletter or want us to conduct workshops on specific topics, drop us a line at 👉 [email protected] and we will get back to you in a jiffy. Thanks for reading. See you next week.👋

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