India Today, Tribune fall for fictional story of teacher bullied online, share it as ‘news’

A ‘story’ about a teacher who was bullied by his students during an online class on a Zoom call was published by India Today, The Tribune and IB Times.

Hindi media outlets Prabhat Khabar and India TV also published similar reports.

The Tribune’s report was tweeted by Cobrapost.

The story is also viral on social media. The tweet below has over 14,000 likes.

Read and please stop abusing your teachers during online class ( I know few people who use videos of Hindustan bhau and abuse the teacher) THIS IS NOT COOL. pic.twitter.com/ODNmlzBQj3

— Meg (@more_megg) July 15, 2020

Fact-check

The story, as it turns out, is fictional. It was shared by Facebook user from Bangladesh Syed Mohammad Fahim on June 30. At the end of his post, Fahim has stated, “I write this fictional story in solidarity to all teachers who are victims of Zoom bombing by shameless students. ”

The story was picked up two weeks later by media outlets after it was shared by the Instagram page tedthestoner on July 16. The page took out the word ‘fictional’ from the story and added a picture of the ‘teacher’. This picture was also used in news reports.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

This definitely deserved a share. Read, understand, implement. Trolling ≠ bullying. You can be funny without hurting someone Principal suddenly called the 55 year old teacher and told him to learn how to take class online. He doesn’t have much to say as he knows that if he denies he will be laid off, at this age in this situation he can’t do any other job, to pay for his family he has no choice. Unwillingly he takes his smart phone to his daughter. His daughter helped him to understand the basic of Zoom, his hands often shake to go around the tabs, he often freezes trying to understand how this thing works but he has no choice. The next day he goes to a market to buy a new white board. The price of these small board soared up, but without these how can he take the class? He took the board in a rickshaw and came home. Placed the board in a chair and started practicing the lesson. It was harder than he thought, staring at a camera and teaching but he has no choice. The next day he wore a new shirt, will be seeing his students after one and half month, his daughter helped him to setup the smart phone, and the students were added and the class went on. He was shaky, his voice cracked every now and then he was nervous but he has no choice. Suddenly an unknown ID started using slang at him, the F word, the A word, open threats. He couldn’t understand how should he react, he shouted out of anger and embarrassment, a teacher is being humulated infront of his students. His life work of earning respect from his students seemed to vanish in seconds. His daughter taught him to mute students but the student could unmute himself, the student kept on using slangs and he did it for entertainment. The only thing the teacher could do was to end the class, as he has no choice. He called for his daughter, she came running and saw her father in tears, she held him tightly tried to calm him down but he kept crying as he never faced such humiliation in his life. That he had troubled sleeping that night, as he knew the next day he has to wake up and face the same ordeal as he has no choice. Note:Abusing a teacher doesn’t make you cool, It makes you sick. Credits: Syed Mohamad Fahim/FB

A post shared by Ted The Stoner (@tedthestoner) on Jul 15, 2020 at 10:14pm PDT

Where is the image from?

A reverse-image search revealed that the photograph of the teacher is a screengrab of a video of an online class held in Bangladesh. A subsequent keyword search on Facebook led us to a post by Bangladesh user Hafiz R Rahman who had shared the video on June 29. In the video, students can be heard conversing in Bengali with a Bangladeshi dialect. They are disrupting the class by mocking the teacher.

Rahman wrote that the teacher’s name is Mohiuddin and the incident occurred while he was taking a class for students of Milestone College, Dhaka. Rahman referred to himself as an ex-student of the college and claimed that he knows the teacher.

In another video, he said that he has informed the college authorities of the incident in hopes that the unruly students would face consequences. He claimed to have shared the details of one of the boys with the college administration. Several people have asked Rahman to take down the teacher’s video however, he says that he will take it down only after the college takes action against the student whose detailed he shared.

A fictional story about a 55-year-old teacher bullied and abused while taking an online class via Zoom was inspired by an actual case that took place in Bangladesh. The person who shared the story clarified that it was fictional. But media outlets did not attempt to locate the original source Syed Mohammad Fahim and cited Instagram page tedthestoner, an account that posts memes and jokes, as the source. It is noteworthy that tedthestoner had named Fahim in its post, yet none of the outlets cross-verified the story. One of the media organisations India Today also has a dedicated fact-checking desk and is recognised by the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN).