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Verified By BOOM 62

Verified By BOOM 62

🌒 India Reached the Moon, So Did Fake News!

August 26, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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Hello,

India was at the moon this week, quite literally! And the readers of this newsletter know: as the news cycle moves on, so does the mis/disinformation trend.

Read on to find out more about the false information related to Chandrayaan-3.

🔖 Did you also receive this image on WhatsApp? Well, many of us at BOOM got it and so did our WhatsApp tipline: 7700906588.

The image claims to show imprints of the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) logo and the national emblem on the moon's surface. Did it really happen?

Fact: BOOM found that the image has been made using Photoshop and no such image has been shared by ISRO yet.

Here’s what we did:

We looked at the photo closely and found a watermark with the text 'Krishanshu Garg' on the bottom left.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for Krishanshu Garg's X (formerly Twitter) profile and found that he had shared the image on 23 August with the text, "Can't wait for this! 🌕🇮🇳"
He told BOOM that he used photoshop to create the viral image. “I shared it on my Instagram story and people mistook it for a real image. I didn't expect it to go viral,” he added.

While the viral image is fake, there is more you should know. Read this fact-check by Hazel Gandhi & Sujith.

Picture Of National Emblem, ISRO Logo Imprint On Moon’s Surface Is Not Real

You can read all the false claims debunked by BOOM around Chandrayaan-3 here.

🅱️ 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!

Teacher Asks Class To Hit Muslim Student; Video From UP Goes Viral

🔖 In a disturbing viral video, a teacher of a private school in Uttar Pradesh is seen encouraging students to slap and beat their classmate, a 7-year-old boy. While the reason for her act is unclear, the teacher can be heard making Islamophobic comments in the video as she asks his classmates to come and slap him one by one; further admonishing some of them for not slapping him harder. In a disturbing viral video, a teacher of a private school in Uttar Pradesh is seen encouraging students to slap and beat their classmate, a 7-year-old boy. While the reason for her act is unclear, the teacher can be heard making Islamophobic comments in the video as she asks his classmates to come and slap him one by one; further admonishing some of them for not slapping him harder.

BOOM’s Nivedita Niranjankumar spoke to the father of the minor and the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Muzaffarnagar.

Teacher Asks Class To Hit Muslim Student; Video From UP Goes Viral.

27 Fact-Checks Published

Communal claims were tied at the top (26%), followed by a tie between political and alarmist claims (18%). Scripted content accounts for 15% of the false claims.

Muslims and Chandrayaan-3 were the targets of false claims last week. Read our Twitter thread to know the detailed analysis by Debraj Sarkar.

#BOOMWeeklyReport | Last week, BOOM published a total of 27 fact-checks. Of these, communal claims were tied at the top (26%), followed by a tie between political and alarmist claims (18%). Scripted content accounts for 15% of the false claims. (1/n)
#BOOMFactCheck#Thread
— BOOM Live (@boomlive_in)
10:56 AM • Aug 25, 2023

Menstruation To Maternity: Women's Health In A Changing Climate

🔖 According to a UN report, the impact of climate change on gender is not the same.

It read, “Women are increasingly being seen as more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change, mainly because they represent the majority of the world's poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources.”

BOOM’s Hera Rizwan spoke to experts who explained how women are more vulnerable to climate change than men, as their gynecological health inadvertently ends up suffering, while balancing familial responsibilities along with their outdoor jobs.

🔫 Guns And Clicks: How Indian Gangsters Became Internet Stars

🔖 Aniket Gupta would make content for YouTube. But he did not know a dead gangster would bring him fame and money. Gupta is a 24-year-old B.Com graduate from Nalasopara town of outer Mumbai who runs a YouTube channel called Durlabh Kashyap Official.

Multiple fan pages of gangsters such as Lawrence Bishnoi, Neeraj Bawana and Durlabh Kashyap regularly produce content in their names, garnering millions of views. How did Indian gangsters become Internet stars?

Vipul Kumar & Rohit Shukla explored for Decode.

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 A week after Ireland-based newspaper The Irish Times published a scathing editorial piece on the prevalence of ethnic and religious violence in India under the Narendra Modi-led administration, several leaders of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party shared another article published on the website of the same newspaper, purportedly as an editorial piece by the media outlet praising Modi for 'transforming India'. Read this fact-check by 🔗Archis Chowdhury↗️ to find out the truth.

🔍 A video showing a Russian plane being shot down by Wanger group soldiers in Russia in June 2023 during their failed mutiny was shared with a false claim that it shows visuals of the recent plane crash involving Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.🔗Anmol Alphonso↗️ debunked the claim.

🔍 A viral message, stating that the State Bank of India will charge ₹57.50 per transaction exceeding 40 transactions through a savings bank account a year, is false, as there is no evidence in the bank's schedule of charges to indicate this. Read this fact-check by 🔗Mohammed Kudrati↗️.

🔍 🔗Nivedita Niranjankumar↗️ debunked a video of two female Kashmiri Pandit school students singing a Hindu religious prayer that went viral with a false claim that they are Muslim students forced to recite Hindu scriptures.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: QAnon destroyed my marriage: a documentary by Coda Story & Newsy

A raw and intimate look at three case studies of conspiracy theories destroying relationships. This is a testament to how weaponisation of information can affect common people.

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

and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

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