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
The official Twitter handle of the Aam Aadmi Party shared a collage of four images to show the difference between MCD schools and Delhi Govt Schools.
BJP MCD vs Delhi Govt pic.twitter.com/fk0BI87EHn
— AAP (@AamAadmiParty) January 9, 2020
Verification
Aam Aadmi Party leader Ankit Lal who is a National Council Member as well as the National Joint Secretary of Innovation and the IT Admin for the Aam Aadmi Party, shared a collage of four pictures to showcase the difference between BJP ruled MCD schools and AAP led Government Schools. Out of the four pictures he posted, two were said to be of MCD schools and the other two were of Government schools in Delhi.
फर्क नियत का है #BJPMostCorruptDepartment pic.twitter.com/G03y4QdOvQ
— Ankit Lal (@AnkitLal) January 9, 2020
Delhi, a poll-bound state, is all set to vote on 8th February. The national capital marks a very significant presence on social media, many nationwide campaigns have been initiated and successfully ran by netizens here such as ‘India Against Corruption’. Considering the announcement of Delhi assembly elections, Misinformation and Fake News machinery of all political parties are all set to show their dark web skills. If you are active on social media, you will see the political propaganda more often now regardless of your political ideology.
As we began to fact check the claim made by Ankit Lal, we decided to fact check all four images of the collage one by one.
Fact-Checking the First Image of the collage:
Using an external tool, we reverse searched the first image, a simple reverse image search led us to a Times Of India report. The TOI report doesn’t contain the same image as of the claim. So we kept investigating.
Now as we dug deeper, we found a report published in India Spend which is founded by Govindraj Ethiraj and is also a founder of fact-checking website Boom. The India Spend report contains the same image with the note “School children study inside their classroom at a primary school, in Brahimpur village, Chhapra district in Bihar. The state has 37.3% fewer teachers than it needs in elementary school (grades I to VIII), and is short of 278,602 teachers, according to our analysis.” Notably, the photo was clicked by Adnan Abidi who is a photographer for Reuters.
A detailed version of the report can be accessed below.
Bihar Short Of 280,000 Teachers; Spends Lowest Per Elementary School Student
School children study inside their classroom at a primary school, in Brahimpur village, Chhapra district, in Bihar. The state has 37.3% fewer teachers than it needs in elementary school (grades I to VIII), and is short of 278,602 teachers, according to our analysis.
We found many other reports that contain the same image as of the claim and all reports suggest that the image is of the Government school in Bihar, not Delhi.
Fact-Checking the second image of the collage:
Using an external tool, we reverse searched the first image but we couldn’t get any authentic report to corroborate.
Fact-Checking the third and the fourth image of the collage:
We followed the same process which is used to verify first and second image but we didn’t any authentic information on these two images.
We will keep investigating the remaining three images and update our article as soon as we get something to corroborate. However, the image which is claimed to be of an MCD school by the official Twitter handle of the Aam Aadmi Party and Ankit Lal turned out to be ‘Misleading’.
Sources
- Google Search
- Reverse Image Search
- Twitter Advanced Search
Result: Partially False
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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.
