WhatsApp University: Did the girl who had three boyfriends really spread coronavirus to a whole bunch of people?
WhatsApp has been at the center stage of disseminating information. Sometimes true news and sometimes fake. Most of the time, we don’t know whether to believe or trash a particular viral message. The best logic would be to confirm it via multiple sources. One such message doing rounds is given below :
“One girl from Delhi is found Corona Positive.So the family of the girl and her boyfriend are now quarantined.Later it was found that the Girl had 3 boyfriends. So 37 members of those 5 families are put to quarantine !! But Now we came to know that 2 of her boyfriends have 2 more girlfriends !! Among those girlfriends, one has 2 more boyfriends !! Among them, one is married!”
According to this particular WhatsApp message, a girl infected with COVID-19 from New Delhi having three boyfriends spread the coronavirus to a total of 56 people. The story was picked up by Southern TV channels and made into primetime news :
Couple detected with #Corona in Delhi.! But the girl allegedly has affair with three other men who are also under observation now. In a new twist, out of three, a man has two more other girl friends. Out of those two one is suspected to have more bfs.pic.twitter.com/vQBBeoyF4o
— SG Suryah (@SuryahSG) April 26, 2020
Many stories on WhatsApp have been fake but there is always some fire that causes the dense fake news smoke. We started to dig deeper into the girl with three boyfriends’ news. We found that the message was not from Delhi but from Karnataka. It was originally forwarded by one, Bhanuprakash as a Karnataka Administrative Services (KAS) exam question :
The news was apparently fake and someone made it up as a question for the KAS. It was, later on, picked up as an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) entrance exam question.
