Odisha Governor, CM Fall To Fake News Again

Bhubaneswar: Odisha Governor Ganeshi Lal and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik seems to have fallen prey to fake news again.

This is what they tweeted from their verified Twitter handle:

Sources in the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO) test range off the Odisha coast, however, said that no such test was conducted on Thursday. Instead, the defence organisation is preparing to test-fire a new variant of the Agni-I missile from Chandipur any time between June 28 and 29.

This is not the first time when well-known, verified Twitter handles have fallen victims to fake news.

In October last year, the CMO’s Twitter handle highlighted a news report citing a purported Oxford University study that praised measures to contain COVID-19 spread in Ganjam district.

The tweet was later deleted after several people started questioning the authenticity of the claim.

A study titled ‘Crowding and the shape of Covid-19 epidemics’ by the Oxford University and Northeastern University was published in “Nature Medicine” journal on October 5. However, there was no mention of the Ganjam and Dharavi model of dealing with the pandemic in the report whose central hypothesis was how unaffected area can see a rapid peak in cases when individuals had high rates of contact within social units, such as households, care homes and prisons.

In August 2020, the Governor and Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Pratap Sarangi had congratulated IAF wing commander Nikhil Rath for a feat he never accomplished.

A native of Balangir, he had cleared the preliminary round of selection to undertake training for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)’s first ‘Gaganyaan’ manned mission to space in 2019 but whether he has made it to the final list of four astronauts is not known.

Fake news circulating on social has been a menace of late. Platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook are widely used in India to check out the news. “Increased dependency on social media platforms for news has resulted in serious problems with misinformation and hate speech,” a study by Reuters Institute said.

Also Read: WhatsApp, FB Most Used Platforms For News In India, Low Trust On TV: Report