Viral video of Muslim pedestrian helping Hindu woman cover herself with burqa is scripted - Alt News
Abhishek Kumar
30th August 2022 / 10:49 am
A video of a woman walking out of a temple while accompanied by a man is widely circulating on social media. In the clip, the pair get out of the temple and sit on a bike and start to leave, during which the woman’s dupatta gets stuck in one of the bike’s wheels. Seeing the woman in distress, a Muslim passerby hands over her burqa to help the lady cover up herself. Social media users have been amplifying this as a real incident.
A user named Zafar Saifi made the same claim while tweeting the video. It racked up more than 1.6 lakh views at the time of writing. Several hours after multiple users questioned the authenticity of the video, Zafar tweeted that though he didn’t know if the video was original or scripted, it had a positive message. (Archived link)
हिंदू पति पत्नी मंदिर में दर्शन करके लोट रहे थे। महिला की साड़ी का पल्लू बाइक के पहिए में अटक गया। महिला बीच सड़क पर बिना पल्लू के असहज महसूस करने लगी। फिर देखिये क्या हुआ। pic.twitter.com/6vwJ5yMR9z
— Zafar Saifi (@ZafarSaifii) August 27, 2022
Another user named Asif made a similar claim while posting the visuals on Facebook. He also wrote, “You can keep on hating, we only know how to love.” It has garnered more than 9,000 views and was shared by over 200 users at the time of writing.
A user named Aashique Rasool also shared the video on Facebook with a similar claim.
A similar clip is widespread on Twitter and Facebook.
Alt News has already fact-checked a number of CCTV videos that have gone viral with various claims from time to time. There were many characteristics in this video which made us suspect that it was scripted. For example, the picture quality of the CCTV footage is unusually high, whereas CCTV footage usually is of a much lower resolution. The recording template and sound effects in this video are also similar to scripted videos that Alt News has investigated before.
Using these clues, we examined the YouTube channel ‘3RD EYE’, which regularly posts scripted videos to spread awareness. This was because Alt News has already debunked a variety of scripted content from this channel in the past. We found the full-length version of the viral video uploaded on this channel on August 23, 2022. The video contains a disclaimer at the end which clearly mentions that all the characters seen here are fictional, and it was made for entertainment and educational purposes only. The video description also states that this channel posts content featuring scripted dramas, which have been created only for entertainment.
You can watch the video in its entirety below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMUlVHJMwkQ]
To sum it up, several social media users mistakenly shared a video of a scripted drama as real. Alt News has fact-checked various such videos in the past, which you can read about here.
Abhishek is a senior fact-checking journalist and researcher at Alt News. He has a keen interest in information verification and technology. He is always eager to learn new skills, explore new OSINT tools and techniques. Prior to joining Alt News, he worked in the field of content development and analysis with a major focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
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