By Archis Chowdhury
An image of a Hindi news article criticising Rahul Gandhi, has been digitally translated in English, and is being falsely shared on social media as a report by a San Francisco-based newspaper criticising Gandhi for his alleged anti-India stance.
The translated image has been viral on social media, and shows an English newspaper article with the title, "Americans are asking, is Rahul from India or Pakistan?" The rest of the article provides a scathing criticism of Gandhi in a highly informal and personal tone.
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The image was widely shared across Facebook and Twitter, with a viral text caption which read, "A San Francisco based Newspaper headline whether "Rahul Gandhi came from #India or #Pakistan". They wrote this because they way he was talking about India, it sounded like an enemy of India can only speak like that. What a shame!"
View more such posts here, here and here.
Fact Check
BOOM used multiple web search engines to look for news reports matching the headline in the viral news report, but were unable to get a match.
However, we observed several discrepancies in the report, that suggested that it was digitally translated from a Hindi article. The font of the entire text appears to be highly inconsistent - which is similar to translated copies provided by Google's image and instant camera translation feature.
Furthermore, the we also found an incomplete text, which bears close resemblance to Hindi.
Taking cue from this, we translated the headline of the article in the viral image in Hindi, and searched for it on social media. This led us to post on Twitter containing an image of the exact same article, but in Hindi.
The user shared the screenshot with a Hindi caption that matched the English title of the viral news report : "अमेरिकी पूछ रहे हैं की राहुल भारत के है या पाकिस्तान को??? प्रश्न तो सही है।।।"
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
Unlike the English version of the news report seen in the viral image, the Hindi version of the article did not contain any discrepencies or font inconsistencies, suggesting that it is the original version.
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BOOM was unable to find the source of the news article. However, we were able to ascertain that the article was originally written in Hindi, and not by a San Francisco-based news paper.
