Authors
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
A viral video, claiming to show a young school girl helping pregnant woman by giving her water and giving her a ride on her BMW car has gone viral on social media. On a quick fact check, Newschecker found that the video to be scripted and meant for educational purposes.
One of the users who shared the video on Twitter by handle @MrPandeyG has over 7000 retweets and over 26k likes. The video has been shared with a caption ‘Humanity is alive’.
The video of the school girl helping pregnant woman has also been widely shared by other social media users and has also been reported by regional media in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and Tamil Nadu.
The video is pitched as a CCTV recording of an incident, where a stranded pregnant woman is writhing in labour pain, while the auto she is travelling in seems to have broken down.
The auto driver is seen asking many passer-bys for help, but no one stops. Later, a blue BMW pulls up, and a small girl gets down and offers water to the suffering woman, and after her request, her father gets out of the car and take away the pregnant woman, presumably to the hospital.
The video shared on most pages are around 3:00 minutes long and ends with a message that says ‘Humanity is still alive, be a human and help others’.
Fact Check/Verification
Newschecker decided to verify the veracity of the video by conducting a keyword search on Google. On looking up the words ‘school girl helping pregnant woman’ the results showed up articles in Tamil and Telugu, thus proving that the video went viral in south India first.
A report by Telugu News18 claims that the incident of the school girl helping pregnant woman took place in Anantpur district.
Another article on TV5news says ‘Humanity still remains… this incident is example’.
Another article published on TamilSpark also made similar claims, and carried praise for the school girl helping the pregnant woman.
Further, Newschecker split the video in keyframes with the help of InVid, and searched the thumbnail of the video, which took us to several posts on Twitter by Tamil pages, confirming our earlier finding that the video of a school girl helping pregnant woman was initially gained popularity in south India.
On closely analysing the video and the captions, we see that the message ‘Humanity is still alive’ is the uniform theme of the video. On a keyword search of the words on Facebook, we found several videos that were much longer in duration.
The videos had a disclaimer in the end that read “This reel like video footage is published only for the purpose of educating the public by making them understand how the real world situations will be. During this video making, we have taken real incidents and picturised (them) to educate the public.” This proves that the video is not authentic but a dramatised version. The disclaimer has been removed from most videos that were posted, to make it appear like a true video.
On further analysing the various posts on Facebook, we see that all of them contain a link to a page called ‘LOBO 619’. When we checked the page of ‘LOBO 619’ we found that the page belongs to a Telugu TV personality and Big Boss contestant Muhammad Khayyum, commonly known as LOBO. We found several such videos on his page with the same background score, which all carried the disclaimer that they were meant for educational purposes.
Conclusion
Scripted video of school girl helping pregnant woman passed off as CCTV footage of an actual incident in social media after removing the disclaimer at the end.
Result: Misleading content/Partly false
Sources
Articles in Telugu media: Telugu News18 and TV5news
Article in Tamil media: TamilSpark
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Authors
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
