Reporter’s Diary: Sniffing for news in fake WhatsApp forwards

But that doesn’t stop the youth from sharing and re-sharing them. Even the journalists, who often are quick to identify the fake ones, take it up with officials concerned, just to be doubly sure. There was one such message that was doing the rounds since Sunday last and journalists could not help but check for its authenticity. The message had a picture of lions in the backdrop of stacked-up freight containers with audio that sounded exactly like those fake warning messages we all are tired listening to. The voice in Tamil warned truck drivers against going to ‘Kamarajar Harbour in Kaattupalli’, since lions are on the prowl there, and suggested they could have escaped from the containers while being brought from some other country. Though it was obvious that it could be a fake warning, this scribe also confirmed with officials that no such incident had occured. A Google search later showed up that the photos were from Port Pipavav’s railway yard in Gujarat and was a week old. The person behind this particular fake message doesn’t even know that ports at Kaattupalli and Kamarajar are not one, but two. Makes one wonder why people are taking so much pain to create fake messages. Cheap thrills, maybe!