No, PM Modi did not post ‘All Eyes on PoK’ message on Instagram

An Instagram story supposedly posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is viral on social media. The screenshot depicts rows of tents in the background of snow-capped mountains with the text ‘All Eyes on POK’ written over it. Several Right-wing handles have circulated the screenshot, implying a call for solidarity with the people in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.

The screenshot went viral in the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Palestine, which has resulted in the deaths of over 15,000 children and left more than 82,000 people injured. On the night of May 26, Israel launched airstrikes on Rafah, an area in southern Gaza which was designated for displaced Palestinians. The resultant deaths caused a massive outrage on social media. People all over the world, including celebrities, condemned the incident and shared an AI-generated image portraying tent camps with the text ‘All Eyes on Rafah’.

Following this, several pro-BJP influencers targeted celebrities for sharing the AI-generated graphic and started circulating an edited graphic of the original image with the text ‘All Eyes on POK’ written over it.

A verified account on X (formerly Twitter), @Incognito_qfs, shared the screenshot with the caption, “All eyes on PoK ~ Narendra Modi” The tweet received 489,000 views, 24,000 likes and 4,100 retweets. This account has been found disseminating misinformation several times in the past.

All eyes on PoK 👀👀

~ Narendra Modi pic.twitter.com/8sy1AoyMC2

— Incognito (@Incognito_qfs) May 28, 2024

Another verified account, @jpsin1, which is followed by the PM on X, also shared the screenshot.

All eyes on PoK 👀👀

~ Narendra Modi pic.twitter.com/nsMp51PgOC

— 🇮🇳Jitendra pratap singh🇮🇳 (@jpsin1) May 29, 2024

Several users also shared it on X.

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Fact Check

At first, we ran a relevant keyword search on Google but did not find any news report on Prime Minister Modi sharing such a post on Instagram. He sharing an edited graphic with the text ‘All Eyes on POK’ would have surely garnered significant media attention.

Meanwhile, several users shared compilations of “All Eyes on Rafah” posts by celebrities. We noticed that some details of the Instagram story uploaded by actress Gauhar Khan were similar to the viral screenshot. For instance, the total number of stories, the time of upload and the number of shares (12.4M) were the same as in the viral image.

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A closer look at the viral screenshot revealed a ‘1 h’ mark on the top left corner, right beside the PM’s handle name. This implies that the screenshot was taken one hour after the story had been posted. If the Prime Minister had indeed shared such a graphic, social media users would have shared different screenshots of the Instagram story, depicting different time-frames. However, all the images shared as an Instagram story by PM Modi had the same time stamp.

To sum up, all of these suggest that the viral screenshot is fake. The PM did not share an ‘All Eyes on POK’ message on Instagram.

Abira Das is an intern at Alt News.