By Zafar Aafaq / Scroll
A viral video of a teacher in Uttar Pradesh telling other students to slap a seven-year-old Muslim boy sparked widespread condemnation last week.
But three days after the video was widely circulated online and on social media platforms, the police on August 28 filed a first information report against Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, for allegedly revealing the identity of the child.
Zubair had posted a video of the incident on X, formerly known as Twitter, on the evening of August 25, but took it down within a few hours after chairperson of the national child rights body Priyank Kanoongo said the identity of the child should not be revealed.
However, Zubair was neither the first nor the only person to share the video on social media. In fact, the video was shared across social media platforms by journalists, activists, news outlets and television news anchors.
Zubair has been targeted in the past as well for his rigorous fact-checking and verification calling out false and communal claims. He was arrested and jailed last year for around three weeks after an anonymous Twitter user complained that Zubair’s tweet from 2018 of a still from a 1983 Bollywood movie had hurt “religious sentiments”.
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