China says photo of its troops at Russian border is fake news: Report
Beijing, Mar 18: China has dismissed as fake news rumours about sending troops to Russia, including a cropped picture showing a fully-loaded Chinese military truck convoy at the border with Russia, according to a media report on Friday.
A photo circulating on Twitter is a cropped version of a picture first published in 2021, China's internet watchdog said.
China had earlier denied reports that Russia had asked it for military support in its Ukraine military offensive.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country's internet watchdog, said on Thursday that there were many fake news reports online aimed at discrediting China's position on the war in Ukraine, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
A photograph of a long line of fully-loaded Chinese military vehicles travelling at night has circulated on Twitter, triggering speculation that China was providing assistance to Russia.
But it was actually an edit of an old shot from May 2021, the CAC said.
A tweet had said a photo of 200 to 300 People's Liberation Army (PLA) trucks was taken by a local driver on March 14 in the north-eastern Heilongjiang province, near Suifenhe, a town on the border with Russia.
The original photo was an official publicity shot of a PLA regiment's night transport exercise in the western region of Xinjiang last year, which was first published in the official PLA Daily on May 10, 2021, the CAC said.
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Gurugram Police arrest BJP Yuva Morcha member for spreading fake murder story on social media
New Delhi: Gurugram Police have arrested BJP Yuva Morcha member Hariom Mishra, for allegedly spreading a fabricated and communally sensitive story on social media about the murder of a college student in Gurugram.
Mishra who is also known as Shaurya Mishra had shared a collage of four photographs on his X handle earlier this month. He claimed that a 24-year-old college student, identified as Nikita Agarwal, had been murdered by her classmate Arif Khan in Gurugram. In the post, he alleged that the woman was blackmailed, forced into prostitution, gangraped, and eventually killed. He also claimed that Arif dumped her body in a forest. The claims were presented as being based on police sources.
The post went viral and garnering over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles across X, Facebook and Instagram. A verification of the claims revealed that no such incident had taken place in Gurugram. A search of credible news reports showed no record of any such murder. The police said this news would have inevitably attracted media attention if it were true.
On December 11, Gurugram Police publicly refuted the claims through their official X handle. They stated that the information which was being circulated was completely false. The police warned that legal action would be taken against those spreading misinformation. Despite the warning, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued any clarification.
Police in Gurugram confirmed Mishra's arrest on December 16. The police said a FIR was filed after he continued to spread false information about the alleged murder of a Hindu woman by Muslim man. Police said Mishra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district, is now being investigated.
Gurugram Police spokesperson Sandeep Singh told The Print that the accused had deliberately misrepresented facts and used objectionable content to spread hatred along religious lines. “Such posts can create serious disturbances in society, and the police take these matters very seriously,” he said.
A reverse image search conducted by fact-checkers at Alt News, revealed that the photographs used in the viral post were unrelated to the claims, while two of the images were traced to a Pinterest account belonging to influencer Maulik Chopra and another image was sourced from an Instagram post by influencer Shivam Thakur featuring a woman named Deepanshi Rawat. The fourth image was found on an unrelated Instagram page. The images depicted different individuals and had no connection to any crime.
Police said they are also investigating Mishra’s motive behind sharing the false and provocative content.
