On Friday, several media outlets reported that Bollywood playback singer Sonu Nigam had tweeted out in support of educational technology company Unacademy, for firing a teacher after a video of him urging students to elect well-educated politicians, went viral on social media.
BOOM found these reports to be false; according to our fact-check the media outlets erroneously mistook a verified X (formerly Twitter) user named Sonu Nigam, who had tweeted in support of Unacademy, as a tweet by the singer. Our fact-check reveals that the user that tweeted in support of the ed-tech company is a criminal lawyer from Bihar, while the singer Sonu Nigam does not have an X account.
On August 13, 2023, a video of Unacedemy tuitor Karan Sangwan went viral where he is seen discussing the recent bill tabled in Lok Sabha by the central government to replace existing criminal laws followed in the country. Sangwan in his online lecture complains that following the recent bill tabled by the government, all the notes he had prepared on criminal law (for the students) are now worthless with the name change. He goes on to add, "Remember one thing, the next time you vote, choose an educated candidate so that you do not have to suffer all this again in life, do not vote for someone who only knows how to change names."
The video of Sangwan was criticised by several pro-government accounts alleging that he was targeting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), despite the fact that he does not specifically mention any political party or leader. Following the viral video, Unacademy on August 17, 2023, terminated Sangwan's contract, with co-founder Roman Saini posting that the educator's comments violated the company’s code of conduct.
News outlet NewsX put out a video report discussing singer Sonu Nigam's support to Unacademy, while sharing the viral tweet. The title of the video on YouTube read, "Singer Sonu Nigam Backs Unacademy, Opposition Slams Govt".
CNN-News18 and Bharat Times also wrote reports on the whole controversy, where they used the viral tweet to report that singer Sonu Nigam had come out in support of Unacademy.
Looking through the responses to the tweet, we found users referring the user as the singer Sonu Nigam.
Fact Check
BOOM looked at the Twitter handle of the user Sonu Nigam who shared the viral tweet, and found that he had used the username @SonuNigamSingh, and had described himself as a criminal lawyer from Bihar. Furthermore, the account was followed by 31,600 followers at the time of writing this article.
We also found that the user had included a link to an Instagram account with the username sonunigamsingh. We went through the images the user posted of himself in this account, including selfies, and found that he does not resemble the singer Sonu Nigam in any way.
We tried looking for the singer Sonu Nigam's X account, but instead came across news reports from 2017 where he stated that he will be quitting the platform (which was then called Twitter).
Using WaybackMachine we also came across archives from singer Sonu Nigam's verified Twitter handle, before it was deleted. This revealed that the singer had used the username @sonunigam on the platform, and not @sonunigamsingh.
NDTV also carried reported Nigam's exit from Twitter in 2017, containing around 20 tweets made by the singer stating his reasons for quitting the platform.
The same lawyer Sonu Nigam had already been misidentified by media outlets as the singer earlier this year, where he tweeted praising the youth in Bihar. This was then fact-checked by BOOM.