A Twitter user named Abhishek Mishra yesterday shared a “news report” that claimed that the BJP was the 4th most corrupt political party in the world according to some CNN survey. He also sarcastically congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on this “big achievement”:
This twitter user, who is followed by none other than Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, has about 32,000 twitter followers and calls himself an RTI activist and a YouTuber. But he is better known to most people as a Madhya Pradesh based Congress supporting troll, who in the past has posted obscene and abusive messages on Facebook and Twitter profiles of people.
His record in spreading fake news is consistent. During demonetisation, Kejriwal had shared a fake news spread by this troll and never bothered to clarify even when the fake news was busted. Incidentally, the troll Mishra had then deleted the tweet that was shared by Kejriwal after it became clear that he was spreading a lie.
However, this time the troll has become emboldened and has not deleted his tweet (at the time of writing this report), even though the website that carried the fake news — titled Siasat and claiming to focus on ‘Muslim issues’ — deleted its article after they realised that it was fake news.
The brazenness of the troll was so pronounced that when people asked him for proof regarding the claims (even after the article was taken down), he not only very confidently attacked the BJP, but went on to congratulated a fake news website:
Lol. So what ??? Whole world know about Bjp and their dirty work… there is nothing wrong, I congratulate BBCnewspoint for their good work
— Abhishek Mishra (@meamabhishek) August 8, 2017
Now as it turns out, the whole CNN survey was indeed fake and fictitious, as has been reported by Dainik Bhaskar newspaper. According to the report, this fake CNN survey was actually part of a viral internet message targeting the BJP, which also contained taunting messages congratulating the Bhakts for this ‘achievement’ by their party.
Bhaskar report reveals that the newspaper talked to the CNN team, which flatly denied that they had carried out any such survey about corrupt political parties where BJP featured.
This fake survey is very similar to another fake survey, which was done by a fake news website that Mishra congratulated above. We had then reported how a fake BBC survey had declared the Congress as one of the most corrupt parties. As it turned out, that survey was actually being spread by Pakistani supporters of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan in order to target Nawaz Sharif’s party and Congress was made a collateral damage in the Pakistani propaganda.
So a fake news, inspired from Pakistani propaganda, used to target BJP, made its way into a news website focusing on Muslim affairs, and was further propagated by a Congress supporting troll, completing the circle of misinformation and lies.
