By Hazel Gandhi
An image showing two male commentators is being shared with the claim they have been banned from the Women's Premier League cricket tournament for making sexist remarks.
BOOM found that image contains a 'satire' label on it, and was shared as a joke, with the original creator of the image taking to social media to confirm the same. Furthermore, we found no evidence of male commentators passing sexist remarks, nor being banned during the ongoing WPL.
India's first-ever 20-20 Women's Premier League, which began on March 4, 2023, is being considered a historic step towards the advancement of women's cricket and its popularity. The image is viral with the false claim in this context.
The post is being shared with the text, "Two male commentators are banned from the WPL after one of them mistakenly said "women hahaha" after a player dropped a simple catch."
Click here to view.
The watermark on this image reads, "tw/hp_mode2", indicating the post first went viral on Twitter. By using this information, we found the original image posted by user @hp_mode2 on Twitter.
Click here to view the tweet and here for an archive.
The post has 2.3 million views and more than 33,000 likes at the time of writing this article. It is also being shared by other users who have fallen for the satirical post with the caption, "Women ☕️", an expression used to mock or ridicule women online.
Click here to view.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the post was shared as a joke, and there is no evidence of such a remark being made during the WPL.
We checked the profile of the user @hp_mode2 who first uploaded this image, and saw "MEMES | CRICKET | PARODY" written in their bio.
Click here to view.
A close look at the viral image also shows "*satire*" written on the left side in a small font.
We checked the comments under the post and saw several users asking whether the news is true, to which @hp_mode2 replied with a clarification that the post was satirical.
We also ran a search for news reports about the WPL or BCCI banning any commentators for their sexist comments and got no hits.
To look for the original image of the commentators used in this post, we ran a search on Google and found an article by Deccan Herald published in May 2019 that carried the same photo.
Click here to view.
The caption of the photo reads, "Sujith Somasundar, Vijay Bharadwaj and (standing) Srinivas Murthy during an IPL match recently." The story was an interview of the three commentators who had done commentary in Kannada for IPL in 2019.
We also went through the list of commentators for WPL 2023, and did not find either of these men on the list.
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