Greater Noida: A round of rumours has been emerging lately after the screenshot from the prominent news outlet saying that three positive cases of corona were confirmed at Cherry County in Greater Noida West. It was shared in the residents' group on Saturday. CitySpidey tried to fact-check the image and found the image to be fabricated.
As per CitySpidey’s investigation, the circulated image has been edited. The original piece of the article is image of different article. The original header of the article was – Coronavirus outbreak: All schools, colleges in UP closed till March 22, says CM Yogi Adityanath.
There are some points which cleared our doubt:
(a) In the edited image while the header was different from the original headline.
(b) The article says that it has been published by Web Desk Lucknow. The question is why would a story from Greater Noida be published from Lucknow when the main office of the organisation is at Noida? Though the original story by the outlet about the school closure was published from Lucknow because it is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh where the Chief Minsiter of the state resides.
(c) The dateline, while the fake news enabler tried his level best to produce this as a genuine news. He/she did several mistakes, the first being changing the date to March 14 (the date of the original article was March 13). Second, every article of the media organisation is updated with a colon (:) which the edited one didn’t.
(d) Alignment of the headline, in order to create panic, a headline going up to five lines was used (the original one has three lines).
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Hence, the article which created a lot of buzz in the residents of Greater Noida West as per this reporter's investigation is fake and created with a malice attempt to create panic.
Notably, our reporter also reached few residents of Cherry County who said that after the screenshot about the news was circulated, the management of the society took immediate cognizance and gave out a circular saying that no case of coronavirus has been found in the society.
The residents have also taken up the matter with the District Magistrate. Last week, during a press conference, the DM BN Singh has clearly said that any person or group who creates panic in people regarding coronavirus will be booked under the UP Gangster Act.
