Umran Hussain
The Kashmir Radar, (RBT): Video of a cow showing way to go to Chrar-e-Sharif to two men in the car in central Kashmir’s Budgam district may have moved your nerves for its being unusual and first of its kind, but the truth behind the video may shock you and may be next time you wont trust everything that surfaces on internet.
Kashmir Radar’s promise to combat fake news and disinformation prompted us to check the veracity of the video and we broke the video into multiple keyframes using various digital verification tools.
Upon reverse searching we found that the same video was uploaded on a YouTube channel in Spain “Marcio Nunes” three weeks ago.
In the video two men driving the car stopped for an adress verification from the cow who coincidentally turns its head backwards which looks like that the cow truly shows them the way to their proposed destination.
From the reaction of the men it clearly indicates that the men were planning to shoot a funny video which depicts from the history of the YouTube channel, as the channel has been posting memes and funny videos since a very long time.
The video shot at an unknown location in Spain has been tagged as “The Cow Show The Way” and Hastagged with #Spain, #Madrid and #Alicante and the men in the car too speak Spanish.
The same video has been downloaded and cleverly dubbed in Kashmiri language where the voice of two men is clearly audible and one of them requesting the driver to stop the car and lower the music to ask the cow about the way that leads to Chrar-e-Sharif.
The video once uploaded on Facebook fetched millions of views on various Kashmiri Facebook pages and individual accounts. Even some News portals were seen making a news out of the video by calling it a miracle.
Earlier, a two minute long video clip went viral on social media, which showed a female teacher being tested for her calculations by a visiting team was circulated with a false angle to demean the goverment teachers in Kashmir. Our fact finding team found that the video was shot in a goverment school in Lahore Pakistan.
In the recent times, alternative facts and fake news are evolving as other names for propaganda and spreads like wildfire by means of various social media platforms. Today every person holds a smartphone in his/her hand and thus is very vulnerable to fake news.
Fake news is a threat to society. The amount of damage they have done to various institutions and individuals is alarming. The fake video in question doesn’t directly or indirectly affect an institution or a person but it sets a trend and trains our brain to believe whatever surfaces on the internet as truth.
Our fact finding team screened more than ten Facebook pages which had uploaded the video with a caption, “Cow Shows ways to Chrar-e-Sharif” and scanned the comment section below all the videos and found that not a single individual questioned the authenticity of the video. Almost all the users in the comment section believed it as a miracle.
