Viral Post About Muslim BTS Fan Playing 'Dynamite' Instead Of Azaan Is Satire

A viral post claiming a Muslim fan of the Korean pop band BTS played their song 'Dynamite' instead of the azaan - the Islamic call to prayer, is fake and was created as satire.

The graphic was made by a satire Instagram page that tried to pass it off as news.

The viral post claims a Muslim fan of the K-pop band BTS played their popular song 'Dynamite' at 4 am over the mosque's loudspeakers in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh. The post further identifies the man as one Aqib Ali and claims that he connected his mobile phone to play the song 'Dynamite' over loudspeakers at the Shahi Atala mosque. The Instagram post also makes up ficticious details about the local police arresting Ali and fining him 3000 rupees.

The fake post, in a bid to give it a sense of veracity, has been made to look like a screenshot of an article on news curation app InShorts, with a headline, story body and a photo of a mosque.

The photo quickly went viral on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with people believing that it was a real incident.

On Twitter many shared just the text of the above claim.

FACT CHECK

BOOM found that the post was created by a satire news Instagram account called @RealinShots, a take on the news curation app, Inshorts. The account which has since deleted the post from Instagram, posted clarification on its Instagram stories features saying the incident is not real and a piece of satire.

A look at the viral image shows a logo on the top right corner which says 'Real Inshots' with the alphabet 'R' missing in the word shorts and designed to look like the logo of the real news service.

We then ran a search on Instagram and found the page called Real In Shots which first posted the fake claim. The page describes itself as 'india's foremost fictitious source of news' and has posted many screenshots of satire news stories, all designed to look real.

The page also posted Insta Stories calling the post fake and pointing out how people were believing it to be real.

Fact Checking site Lead Stories which also debunked the claim included the actual clarification posted by the page where the admins of the Instagram page called the incident "not real". The Instagram satire page has since deleted the post and the story highlights have disappeared.

The Instagram satire account which first made and posted the piece of fake news is operated by a Trishit Banerjee who has created three such satire news page. The Real In Shots page is a take on InShorts, the secon RealNDVT is a take on news channel on NDTV and the third is called @katvaIndia, designed to look like the right wing page TheTatva and a take on a pejorative slur used for Muslims in India.

The page @katvaIndia has in the past too posted satire news which went viral, causing them to issue a clarification. The earlier post claimed, a nurse who cracked a crude joke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi while he was getting vaccinated, has been fired.