Doctored screenshot of Dawn’s story on floods surfaces on social media, attempts to mislead public
A doctored screenshot of a Dawn story on the catastrophic floods in Pakistan has been making rounds on social media.
The original Dawn report with the headline ‘Army called in as KP faces flood threat’ was published in the newspaper on August 27 and appeared on Dawn.com the same day.
The doctored screenshot, however, features the following false headline: ‘Flood in Pakistan is not due to Climate Change, but because people are not reading Quran.’ It has been shared multiple times on Twitter and Facebook, mostly by accounts identifying themselves as Indian users.
The image is cropped to show only the doctored and false headline and the picture collage from the original story. It features elements of the story’s web version, including the Dawn logo at the top, as well as the original bylines.
However, the font of the false headline is starkly different from what appears on Dawn.com. The doctored screenshot’s headline also does not adhere to the Dawn style guide in the following ways: it uses uppercase Cs for the words climate and changethe false headline reads like a statement without being attributed to a personality
The original story talks about Pakistan Army being deployed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after floods wreaked havoc in the province last week. The fabricated headline shown in the doctored screenshot neither appears in the actual story nor anywhere else on the website.
Separately, Fact Crescendo, an India-based website, in a report published today, also ran an independent fact check and confirmed that the screenshot circulating online was “altered”.
“The image has been altered and is being distributed with a false claim,” it concluded.
Source: Dawn
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