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The month of August came with its wave of misinformation, especially with the new trend of Airline sagas and the debates across various social media platforms.
As part of DUBAWA’s effort to sanitise the media space, we investigated some of these falsehoods and gave detailed explanations on issues of public concern.
Find below a summary of some top claims DUBAWA fact-checked during the week.
- Old video recirculated to report recent Ibom Air disruption
Since the recent altercation involving Wasiu Ayinde (KWAM 1) and Comfort Emmanson, reports about the aviation industry have been in the spotlight, leading to unrelated airline scenes flooding the social space to rake in engagement.
One such post is a series of six-minute and two-minute videos shared on Facebook, showing commotion on an Ibom Air-branded aeroplane. The post claims that it happened recently after the KWAM 1 and Comfort’s incident.
Meanwhile, an investigation carried out by DUBAWA revealed that the videos are not recent.
Read more here.
- Chimamanda Adichie’s comment on airline disruption?
Following the Airline incident that led to a forceful exposure of the Ibom Air passenger, Comfort Emmansone, many users have blamed the exposure to her indecent dressing.
Amidst this, a quote was attributed to Chimamanda Adichie, alleging that the author said she felt no pity for Comfort because she was indecently dressed.
However, DUBAWA did not find evidence that Chimamanda made the quote attributed to her. Also, no credible news report has confirmed any comment from Chimamanda since the airline issue erupted.
Read more here.
- Saudi Arabia’s persecution list
Recently, a claim circulated on X and Facebook claiming that Saudi Arabia has just released the names of Nigerians on death row.
The user further claimed that the names are devoid of Igbos, pushing an ethnic-aligned narrative with slides containing a screenshot of The Cable report.
However, an extensive keyword search on the claim’s veracity shows that the list shared has been online since April 2019, not a recent incident as claimed.
Read more here.
- Did Hushpuppi attend Davido’s wedding?
Following Davido’s white wedding to his longtime girlfriend, Chioma Rowland, in Miami, United States, an X user shared a video showing the attendance of convicted cyber criminal Ramon Abbas, popularly known as Hushpuppi.
Meanwhile, a reverse image search revealed that the video has been online since 2020, before his sentence in the United States in 2022. The video is old and unrelated to Davido’s wedding in Miami.
Read more here.
- Does WhatsApp alert users when their chats are screenshotted?
Over the weeks, there has been a trending claim that WhatsApp has added a new feature that alerts a person when the other party in a conversation takes a screenshot of their message or media.
DUBAWA searched credible media reports and WhatsApp’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page to verify if such a feature has been added to the platform but found no confirming evidence to back up the claim.
As available on WhatsApp’s blog post, the latest feature adopted by the tech company is a message summary which allows users to catch up on unread messages in a chat by using Meta AI to summarise conversations, which is only available in the United States.
Read more here.
