Pictures accompanying Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s social media posts on the floods in Assam, Bihar and UP are not of the current situation, according to a fact checking website.
At 11.58 pm on July 19, Congress general secretary Vadra had tweeted: “Life has been disrupted by floods in many areas in Assam, UP and Bihar. We are ready to help those affected by floods. I appeal to Congress workers and leaders to make every possible effort to help the affected."
The tweet was accompanied by two photographs. Two more pictures were added to that message, which also appeared on her verified Facebook page.
Mohd. Nadeem Siddiqui, an independent fact checker with Hoax Slayer said, “These are narrative pictures—the kinds which are used in every flood."
A reverse image search on Google for the images found that one photo—of a submerged village—was from a flood in Assam in 2019. “This image was found in several media articles at that time… We found this image on a DD news’s online website article dated July 28, 2019," reads the fact check report by Siddiqui on Hoax Slayer. The same picture was also used in other news reports of the time.
The other image, of a man submerged in water, with only his face showing as he attempts to save his food grains, was taken in the flood in Bihar in 2017. It had appeared in multiple media reports at that time.
“Therefore, in our investigation, it was found that these viral pictures are not from the current flood situation of Assam, UP, and Bihar. Instead, they are old pictures from the flood," concludes the report. While the original posts have now been taken down, archived views are still available.
“Social media teams just Google search and embed the first picture that they get. They never check if it is an old or a new picture," Siddiqui told THE WEEK.
