'Zubair Ahmed, a journalist working in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has been arrested allegedly for a tweet asking why a family was put under quarantine for speaking over phone to a COVID-19 patient.
'A district court lawyer in Kanpur was arrested on the charge of sedtion for retweeting a video of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and calling him a terrorist on Sunday. The man, Abdul Hannan, commented on a tweet by State Information Department’s Media Advisor Shalabh Mani Tripathi on Saturday. The tweet by Tripathi had a video of Adityanath’s Vidhan Sabha speech supporting cane charge on people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC)...'
'Four images have been shared hundreds of times in multiple Facebook and Twitter posts alongside a claim that they show a Muslim restaurant owner in the Indian city of Coimbatore mixing impotency pills in biryani before serving it to non-Muslim customers. The claim is false; the photos were taken from online sources unrelated to the restaurant; police in Coimbatore said there was “no truth” in the claim...'
'On February 28, several social media users shared a 20-second video of a building engulfed in fire. The viral message blamed “Islamic jihad” for the incident and claimed that this occurred in Paris. “After burning India’s capital, the terrorist community has burnt the French capital as well. #IslamicJihad Now tell did the riots happen because of @KapilMishra_IND’s speech. There is only one solution #EconomicBoycott,” reads the message... Twitter user @Satynistha posted the viral video (archive link).
'Activists and individuals who support the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens-National Population Register protests said they got an email from Twitter Legal informing them that the micro-blogging giant has received a request that certain content be taken out. One such activist, S Q Masood, claimed that Twitter informed him that they received a legal request asking them to remove a tweet posted from his account.
'Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok will have to reveal users’ identities if Indian government agencies ask them to, according to the country’s controversial new rules for social media companies and messaging apps expected to be published later this month. The requirement comes as governments around the world are trying to hold social media companies more accountable for the content that circulates on their platforms, whether it’s fake news, child porn, racist invective or terrorism-related content.
'On January 15, 2020, Amit Malviya, national in-charge of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) IT cell, shared a video of a random group of persons insinuating that the women of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh are protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) for money. His allegation was found baseless by a collaborative Alt News-Newslaundry investigation. But this hardly discouraged Malviya... Two days hence, he shared a photograph of an elderly man eating biryani at Shaheen Bagh.
'Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday made a reference to Harappan-era seals in her Budget speech, claiming one of them contained the word “sreni”. Social media users soon pointed out that the Harappan script had not yet been deciphered. Trade and commerce have existed in India since the Harappan civilisation, Sitharaman said in her speech to drive home the point how entrepreneurship has always been there in the country. She referred to the Indus Valley Civilisation as the “Saraswati Sindhu Civilisation”, and claimed that the word “Sreni [guilds]” was written on a Harappan seal.
'For each pro-Congress account spreading propaganda and fake news on Twitter, there are 120 doing the same for the BJP, a study has claimed. The study has been conducted by a user of the social media portal Reddit who goes by the username ‘/u/onosmosis’. The user claims to have analysed lakhs of unverified Twitter accounts to identify trends in online misinformation. Conducted with the help of an algorithm, the study started by identifying around 4 lakh Twitter accounts with a clear political leaning.
'Kailash Vijayvargiya, the national general secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, on Thursday said that the construction workers at his house had “strange eating habits” that aroused suspicions about their nationality, PTI reported. The labourers were only consuming poha, a popular dish made from flattened rice, Vijayvargiya said at a seminar on the Citizenship Amendment Act in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. “I suspected these workers were residents of Bangladesh,” he said. “Two days after I became suspicious, they stopped working at my house.”...'
