News Outlets Including TOI, Zee News, PTI Fall for Amartya Sen’s Death Hoax

News agency Press Trust of India (PTI) and outlets including The Times of India and Zee News ran false reports of economist and Nobel awardee Amartya Sen passing away. BOOM found that the reports are false and the death hoax originated from a fake account impersonating recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin.

The tweet from the account purportedly belonging to Goldin shared a picture of Sen with the caption, "A terrible news. My dearest Professor Amartya Sen has died minutes ago. No words."

Click here to view the post and here for an archive.

Following this tweet, PTI, (archive here) Times of India (archive here), Zee News (archive here), Free Press Journal (archive here), and Deccan Chronicle (archive here) carried reports of Sen's death.

The claim is also circulating on Facebook.

Click here to view the post.

FACT CHECK

BOOM found that the viral claims are false. We reached out to Nandana Sen, daughter of Amartya Sen, who rubbished the viral claims and informed that her father was doing well.

We found that Nandana Sen had shared a post on X on October 10 rubbishing the viral claims while saying "Baba is totally fine" and that he was "busy as ever."

Read the full post here:

BOOM also reached out to Nandana Sen who confirmed that the clarification was made from her X account. She also said, "This is absolutely fake. My father is doing fine."

The fake Claudia Goldin account on X (@profCGoldin) was set up in May this year and had 5 posts and 12,400 followers at the time of writing this fact-check. We also found that the account put out another post and claimed that it belonged to Italian writer Tommaso De Benedetti.

Click here for an archive.

Tommaso De Benedetti is a popular Italian hoaxer who claims to put out fake posts to expose the weakness of the media. BOOM has previously written about De Benedetti when another death hoax about noted Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro went viral. Read here.