Authors
A self-taught social media maverick, Saurabh realised the power of social media early on and began following and analysing false narratives and ‘fake news’ even before he entered the field of fact-checking professionally. He is fascinated with the visual medium, technology and politics, and at Newschecker, where he leads social media strategy, he is a jack of all trades. With a burning desire to uncover the truth behind events that capture people's minds and make sense of the facts in the noisy world of social media, he fact checks misinformation in Hindi and English at Newschecker.
Claim
Finally India got its Coronavirus Dashboard. This is the official website for CORONA updates. This website is being updated every 4 hrs. You can scroll down for more details, you can know more about coronavirus outbreak in your state by placing your finger on your state on the map.
T 3481 – Finally India got its Carona Dashboard
This is the official website for CORONA updates. Updating every 4 hrs..
open it .. see .. scroll down for more details .. place finger on your State and get the numbers info ..https://t.co/uNyPkG2luF pic.twitter.com/akg3Kj5Sbt— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) March 25, 2020
Verification
Bollywood veteran and the superstar Amitabh Bachchan, also known as ‘Big B’, made a tweet and claimed that India has got its first coronavirus dashboard where details are being updated every four hours. He also listed the benefits of visiting the website. Bachchan, who is followed by as many as 40.7 million Twitter users, got 1.6k retweets and 8.5k likes on the said tweet. However, the same claim was sent to us for fact-checking by a reader and as soon as we began fact-checking the tagged claim, we noticed that the same claim was amplified by the Bollywood veteran as well.
We first checked the website and it is clearly mentioned in their FAQ section that the website is not official.
We also found a reply by the official handle of the website to the aforementioned tweet by Mr. Bachchan, informing that theirs is not the official website.
Thanks for sharing our work. We are a crowdsourced project contributed by several volunteers! However, we are not the “official” dashboard. Maintain social distancing! Stay safe!
— covid19indiaorg (@covid19indiaorg) March 25, 2020
It is noteworthy that it is clearly mentioned in the Twitter bio of the said website that they are a volunteer-driven crowdsourced tracker of Covid19 cases in India.
When we checked the who.is data of the said website, we noticed that the website is registered through a third party namely ‘Contact Privacy Inc.’ which is a service that protects the privacy of domain name holders in the WHOIS system and is often used by website publishers to conceal their original identity.
Hence it is imperative from our findings above that the website is not official and the same was brought to Mr. Bachchan’s notice as well.
No Sir, it is clearly mentioned on the website that it is not the official website, please do not spread rumors. To know more, please refer to this link: https://t.co/V51andkaTP pic.twitter.com/Fjrwd5FZAH
— newschecker.in (@NewscheckerIn) March 25, 2020
However, it seems that Mr. Bachchan is unwilling to post a clarification or delete his tweet as the tweet is still there on his timeline when this report is being written.
Hence it is evident that the said website is not official and the tweet made by Bollywood superstar is misleading.
Sources
- Google Search
- Who.is
Result: Misleading
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Authors
A self-taught social media maverick, Saurabh realised the power of social media early on and began following and analysing false narratives and ‘fake news’ even before he entered the field of fact-checking professionally. He is fascinated with the visual medium, technology and politics, and at Newschecker, where he leads social media strategy, he is a jack of all trades. With a burning desire to uncover the truth behind events that capture people's minds and make sense of the facts in the noisy world of social media, he fact checks misinformation in Hindi and English at Newschecker.
