A parody account’s tweet posting an imagined response to the controversy surrounding lyrics of a viral Malayalam song made waves on Twitter. One of the reasons for its stupendous success was that the attempted humour was not too far from something that could have happened in reality.
Just In : After the viral video of Priya Prakash Varrier, Whenever we or our fellow Muslim Brothers closed our eyes to offer Namaz, instead of Allah, her face would appear, which is hurting our sentiments, hence we issued a fatwa against her.”
– Maulana Atif Qadri (File Pic) pic.twitter.com/YOksBNt8S0
— TIMES HOW (@TiimesHow) February 14, 2018
Seasoned journalists and editors with blue ticks fell for the tweet.
Vidya Krishnan, health & science Editor of The Hindu, IRP Fellow2015 and contributor to Caravan India was one of the journalists who fell for the tweet. The tweet by Vidya Krishnan condemning the ‘Tharki Buddhu’ was retweeted by another journalist of The Hindu, Vasudha Venugopal.
Samrat X, former editor of newspapers in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chandigarh thought that the tweet was real.
We are not sure if Saurabh Joshi, editor of StratPost and Delhi Durbar thought it was a parody account or a real one.
Bhuvan Bagga, a South Asia correspondent for AFP has already deleted his tweet, but we have a screenshot.
In case you wondered, this is Poe’s Law at work.