After being caught spreading fake news, far-left propagndists and their affiliated organizations are trying to brazen it out by spreading even more fake news.
Far-left propagandist Faye D’Souza, who has a long history of spreading false information, has shared an article from Reporters Without Borders which attempts to completely rewrite the details of the Ghaziabad fake video case. “Three Indian journalists could be jailed for nine years for tweets about video,” the title of the article says.
While the title is technically correct — the self-professed journalists and fact-checkers could indeed face jail time — the article completely obscures the reasons behind why the FIR has been filed against them. In an exhibition of propaganda that would make Kim Jong-un proud, the article manages to get through nearly 750 words without once mentioning that the journalists had shared fake news which had the potential to inflame communal passions.
“Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the police of northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state to immediately withdraw the absurd charges, including “criminal conspiracy,” that they brought against three journalists for tweeting about a video of an elderly man being beaten up by other men. The accusation clearly borders on harassment, RSF says,” the article says.
“They are accused of conducting a “criminal conspiracy” although all they did was post tweets about a video showing an elderly man identified as a Muslim being badly beaten in Ghaziabad by several other men, who shaved his beard and forced him to chant “Jai Shri Ram,” a Hindu chant that has become a rallying cry for religious extremists,” the article continues.
But the article never mentions that the claim that these “journalists” had made, that the man had been forced to chant Jai Shri Ram, is fake. A police investigation revealed that several of the attackers were themselves Muslim, and they’d never forced the victim to chant Jai Shri Ram. The police discovered that the fight had broken out because of a personal issue between the men, and had no communal undertones.
But Alt News’ Mohammed Zubair appeared to have cleverly muted the attack video while sharing it on social media, while making the claim that the man was being forced to chant Jai Shri Ram. Had the video not been deliberately muted, viewers could’ve immediately known that the victim was never forced to say Jai Shri Ram, but the muted video, along with the fake claim, appeared to be intentionally engineered spread to cause panic and communal riots.
It’s for these reasons that the Uttar Pradesh Police registered an FIR against the people who’d spread the muted video with the fake claim, but Reporters Without Borders conveniently glossed over these details in its article. It’s unclear who wrote the Reporters Without Borders article — the article does not have an author credit, and is credited directly to the organization — but Faye D’Souza is presumably in possession of full facts of the case. The fact that she shared the article to her 1 million followers, without adding any information about the details around the why the FIR is filed, is itself an instance of spreading fake news, and the Uttar Pradesh police would do well to investigate how the case is being misrepresented on social media by prominent left-wing propagandists.
