The assembly bypoll for the Jayanagar constituency in Karnataka is set to take place on 11 June.
Ahead of the election, a morphed photo of Congress candidate Sowmya Reddy has been doing the rounds on social media and on WhatsApp. The image shows Reddy sitting at a table with a plate of non-vegetarian food before her. The insinuation here is that Reddy, who is a self-proclaimed vegetarian, is essentially a liar and a hypocrite.
‘Jayanagar Welfare Association’, the page that posted this photograph, has also targeted Reddy in other posts, body-shaming her and stating that “she is growing fatter by the day”, while the BJP and AAP candidates have lost weight due to campaigning. All these messages are recent and have been posted in the last 12 hours.
Fake News
Alt News was approached by Sowmya Reddy, who claimed that the image is photoshopped. “I am contesting from Jayanagar and we have by-elections on 11 June. I am an activist for the past 15 years and I decided to take a plunge into electoral politics so that I can be inside the system to serve more people,” Reddy told Alt News.
I started off my activism through animal and environmental rights and most people know that I’m vegetarian since I was 12 (mostly vegan). I was also one of the people behind the plastic ban. Opposition has stooped to a new low and are indulging in personal attacks with photoshopped pictures to suggest that I don’t practice what I preach.Sowmya Reddy
She added that her personal belief was that everyone’s choice for food was “personal” and despite being a vegetarian, “people have the right to eat what they want, it is a personal choice and it shouldn’t be forced upon.”
Reddy then went forth to send Alt News the original picture, which shows that nothing had been served on the empty plate that was kept in front of her.
Meat Photoshopped Onto Plate
To ascertain her claim, Alt News cropped the image of the non-vegetarian delicacy shown in the image. Using Google’s reverse image search option, it found that it is a generic promotional image of butter chicken which has been used by a number of restaurants for a long time.
Misinformation of this nature often follows a predictable, observable pattern. With the by-election to the Jayanagar constituency barely days away, the fake news machinery has expectedly swung into action.
Alt News had chronicled the spike in fake news in the run up to the Karnataka assembly election in May 2018. This instance is yet another attempt to sway public opinion ahead of polling through the use of a photoshopped picture that shows an electoral candidate in poor light.
(Published in arrangement with Alt News.)
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