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A video of a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Madhya Pradesh urinating on a tribal man named Dasmat Rawat went viral recently causing widespread outrage on social media. 

Days after the video went viral, multiple people on social media claimed that Dasmat Rawat was not the real victim. Read on to know the real story!

Read on.

🅱️ Quiz

Do you know what really happened in the news this week? Find out by taking the BOOM quiz:

👆 Simply click on image below to start the quiz!

On an average, BOOM debunks nearly 100 fact-checks each month. These fact-checks debunk false/ misleading claims that go viral on social media. 

Broadly speaking, these claims can be divided into 7 types:

• Satire or parody: No intention to cause harm but has potential to fool

• Misleading content: Misleading use of information to frame an issue or individual

• Imposter content: When genuine sources are impersonated

• Fabricated content: New content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm

• False connection: When headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content

• False context: When genuine content is shared with false contextual information

• Manipulated content: When genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive

But, you might be wondering how this is useful for you. 

Well, it's as useful/ important as knowing the difference between misinformation and disinformation. 

If you are aware of the aforementioned categories, it helps you to analyse the claim better and judge what exactly about that viral information is false or misleading.

🤥 The Lie Count

26

Fact-Checks Published

Communal claims were most predominant (39%), followed by Alarmist claims (15%) and Political ones (15%).

Read our Twitter thread to know the detailed analysis by Debraj Sarkar.

The Real Story Of The Man Whose Feet Madhya Pradesh CM Washed

🔖 A video of Pravesh Shukla, member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Sidhi, Madhya Pradesh urinating on a tribal man named Dasmat Rawat went viral on 3 July causing widespread outrage on social media. A few days later photo-ops showed Chief Minister Shivraj Singh washing Rawat's feet. 

The video that went viral was from 2020. 

BOOM’s Anil Tiwari went to the village where Dasmat Rawat lives and met around 20 people - his family members, neighbours and government officials to confirm whether he was the same man seen in the video.

Read More

Crimes Against Scheduled Tribes On The Rise In India, But It's More Than A Law and Order Problem 

🔖 Madhya Pradesh is once again in the spotlight for atrocities against the Adivasi community. 

Over the decade, crime rate against the scheduled tribes in India have shot up by nearly 50%, cases pending police investigation up by 68.1%.

However, these incidents cannot be seen as isolated cases, but rather stemming from systemic issues, experts told BOOM's Nidhi Jacob.

Read More

Poor Rating, Blocking IDs: Why Urban Company Workers Are Protesting 

🔖 “I've been working at this job for three years, and my rating was usually around 4.5 or 4.6 out of 5. But the company's new rules to maintain a high rating are just too hard,” she said with a pessimistic tone. 

For a while now, workers of Urban Company have been protesting an ongoing issue of frequent ID blocking for the past year, which has escalated in recent months. Decode's Kaisar Andrabi spoke to 14 female gig partners, all of them expressed that they have had different forms of loans taken over the years and now the blocking of IDs have made them anxious about their future. 

Read More

Who Will Fact Check Centre’s Fact Checker?: Bombay High Court 

🔖 On 13 July, the Bombay High Court said except the court, nobody had the authority to pronounce what is true and false while questioning the Centre’s amendment to the Information and Technology (IT) Rules, 2023 which empowered its Fact-Checking Unit (PCU) to decide with “absolute authority” what is fake, false, or misleading. 

BOOM’s Ritika Jain recaps the arguments and observations made so far.

Read More

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 Recently, two men, Phanindra Subramanyam and Vinu Kumar, founders of an internet broadband service in Bengaluru were brutally murdered in their office. Following the incident, several false claims started doing the rounds claiming one of the victims Phanindra Subramanyam was a Hindu seer and that the murder was communal in nature. Here's how BOOM's 🔗Nivedita Niranjankumar↗ debunked the claim.

🔍 A cropped news report about a letter written by Naorem Mohen, General Secretary of the Manipur Patriotic Party to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi blaming the Congress party for the violence in Manipur was shared with a false claim that the letter was written by the president of the Manipur Congress. Read this fact-check by 🔗Srijit Das & Anmol Alphonso↗.

🔍🔗Srijit Das↗  debunked an old video of people pushing an SUV trapped in a flooded road which was recently shared on social media falsely claiming that the video is from Delhi. 

This video is being used to claim that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was spotted eating non-vegetarian food during the month of Sawan. However, this video is from a popular eatery in Delhi and dates back to April this year. Here's a fact-check by🔗Srijit Das↗.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship by Cristina Corduneanu-Huci and Alexander Hamilton

This study delves into in-depth analysis of historical instances of authoritarian regimes and their modus operandi for censorship to devise an effective countermeasure for protecting voices of dissent and truth in the event of such a takeover in the future.

Read More

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