Congress-supporting troll, true to his word, is back spreading fake news on his website. We had earlier reported how ViralinIndia.net, a fake news website with anti-Modi and pro-Islamist propaganda, was being run by a pro-Congress troll Abhishek Mishra. It was ‘temporarily’ shut down as the team was busy ‘covering the elections’. As the five-state assembly elections concluded last week, the website is back up and running spreading bizarre fake news and fake narrative.
On 6th December, the fake news website published an article claiming that a watch worth Rs. 15 lakh was stolen from Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’ wedding reception in Delhi.
The reception was attended by Prime Minister Modi, who has a habit of stealing from his childhood, claims the report.
“In his childhood, Modi stole all jewellery from his mother’s cupboard and ran away. Modi’s father died out of this shock,” the report said.
At first, we thought perhaps this is a bad satire, and tried looking for tags or disclaimer that could show it is satire. We could not find any. Over and above the anti-Modi outlandish accusations made by this watch, we found out that the ‘luxury watch’ image the website has used is actually available for Rs. 399 on Amazon.
The claim about Prime Minister Narendra Modi having stolen some belongings from his home in his childhood is a fake news spread by pro-Congress ecosystem, and the same was repeated on this website.
We casually glanced through other articles on this fake news pro-Congress propaganda website. Another article claims that Prime Minister Modi while campaigning for Rajasthan elections in Sikar, ‘ran away’ when people started shouting ‘Chowkidar chor hai’. The article claims that Modi ‘escaped’ in a helicopter. To verify, we checked out the video of Modi’s rally in Sikar. In the hour-long video, we could not see Modi ‘fleeing’ the spot in a helicopter.
Before ‘temporarily’ shutting the website
Before the website resumed its operations on 3rd December, last article was published on 8th October. One such article claimed that the accusations against PM Modi have reached the Supreme Court and following the 10th October verdict, Modi may soon end up in jail. On 10th October, the Supreme Court refused to issue a notice in Rafale deal petition but asked the government to furnish the detail of the decision making process in a sealed cover, without technological parameters or suitability of the aircraft. Today, the Supreme Court dismissed all the petitions for investigation.
The fake news factory does not stop on this website alone. On a Facebook page named “I support Ravish Kumar” (NDTV India journalist), ‘ViralinIndia.net’ has shared a fake news that in today’s verdict, Supreme Court has rapped the Modi government and that the Opposition and people of India want to know what the details of the Rafale deal.
This is shocking because the Supreme Court has said no such thing. The post has been shared almost 1,000 times on Facebook.
Another Facebook page created in support of Sonia Gandhi has shared another post with ‘viralinIndia.net’ logo, which claims that former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, on his successor Urjit Patel’s exit claimed that “Narendra Modi has ruined the country.”
While Rajan did express concern about Patel’s exit from RBI, he never said that Modi has ruined India. There are dozens of such pages that share such fake news and quotes credited to ‘Viral In India’.
Social networking platforms have recently said they are trying to take concrete steps to curb spreading the fake news menace. These platforms are regularly used by fake news peddlers to amplify the fake news. Despite this, the website, as well as various Facebook pages run by Mishra and his team, continue spreading fake news.
It should be noted that Abhishek Mishra is based in Madhya Pradesh and now there is a Congress government in the state.