Here’s a round-up of this week’s News You Almost Believed.
There were many videos going viral during after the fire that broke out at Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL)'s Mahul refinery in Mumbai. One such video showing CCTV captured visuals of a powerful explosion rapidly engulfing a refinery also went viral along with the others. BOOM was able to trace the video to a horrific accident that happened in Mexico in 2012. 30 workers were killed following the deadly blast at the Mexican state-owned oil and gas company Pemex's natural gas facility at Reynosa. Read the full story here.
A video claiming that a young man in Mumbai's Thane district is jabbing school children with an injection containing a deadly virus to kidnap them is going viral on social media. The video was viral on Facebook and Whatsapp with many claiming that the man would loiter around schools and attack young school girls by poking them with an injection. Police officials BOOM spoke to say the 23-year-old man seen in the video is dyslexic and was in fact jabbing the children with a ballpoint pen. Read the full story here.
A series of old photos of seriously wounded people and old videos of rioting are being shared online to falsely claim Muslims attacked Kanwar yatris. The posts with three photographs from separate incidents and two unrelated videos have gone viral with text in Hindi that falsely claim Kanwariya pilgrims were attacked by Muslims. It has received over 24,000 shares on an unofficial Facebook page called 'We Support RSS.' Read the full story here to know more about the images and the videos.
A 1:05 minute video that shows an hysterical woman verbally abusing an immigration officer and finally slapping him in anger has gone viral across Facebook and Twitter with two claims - that the woman is an Indian and she has been sentenced to 3 years in jail. A Twitter handle @trehan_barkha tweeted the video making the claim. The video has been viewed more than 20,000 times. But the woman was identified as Auj-e Taqaddas is in fact a British national of Pakistani origin. Read the full story here.
Sourav Ganguly took to Twitter earlier in the week to distance himself from an unverified Instagram account with a large following, that was believed to be run by the former India captain. The southpaw called the account which shared a similar name (@sganguly99) with his verified Twitter account (@SGanguly99), fake while also tagging Virat Kohli's official Twitter handle. Read the full story here.
Images of a bizarre looking creature which looks like a mix of a pig and a human have been going around on social media for quite some time now. The claim going around with these images is that a pig died after giving birth to a human like baby. But it's actually an artwork. Artist Laira Maganuco from Italy is the creator of the sculpture. She not only makes such sculptures but also sells them online. We found her Facebook profile which clearly mentions that these were not real life creatures but art works made of silicon. Read the full story here.
A video of a tablet opening into a tissue was shared with us on our helpline by a reader. In the video, a person can be seen taking out a tablet from the strip and opening it like a piece of cloth. The same video had gone viral in Odisha in June 2017 with several news sites like OMMCOMM News and Odishatv.in debunking the prospect of fake medicines being sold in the market. The reports explain how a misunderstanding between a doctor and his patient led to the video going viral in the state. Read the full story here.