Debunking the Viral Claim of Free Travel Service for Women at Night
Introduction
In the age of social media, the news can spread like wildfire. A recent viral claim contained that police have started a nationwide scheme of free travel service for women at night. It stated that any woman who is alone and cannot find a vehicle to go home between 10 PM and 06 AM can contact the provided numbers and request a free vehicle. The viral message further contained the request to share and forward this information to everyone to get the women to know about the free vehicle service offered by police at night. However, upon fact check the claim was found to be misleading.
Social Impact of Misleading Information
The fact that such misleading information gets viral at a fast speed is because of its ability to impact and influence people through emotional resonance. Especially during a time when women's safety is a topic discussed in media sensationalism due to recently highlighted rape or sexual violence incidents, such fake viral claims often spark widespread public concern, causing emotional resonance to people and they unknowingly share or forward such messages in the spike of emotional and sensational appeal contained in such messages. The emotional nature of these viral texts often overrides scepticism, leading to immediate sharing without verification.
Such nature of viral messages often tends to bring people to protest, raise awareness and create support networks, but in spite of emotional resonance people get targeted by misinformation and become the unintended superspreaders of fake news fueled by emotional and social media-driven reactions. Women’s safety in society is a sensitive topic and when people discover such viral claims to be misleading and fake, it often hurts the sentiments of society leading to significant social impacts, including distrust in social media, unnecessary panic and confusion.
CyberPeace Policy Vertical Advisory for Social Media Users
- Think before Sharing: All netizens must practice caution while sharing anything and double-check its authenticity before sharing/forwarding or reposting it on your social media stories.
- Don't be unintended superspreaders of Misinformation: Misinformation with emotional resonance and widespread sharing by netizens can lead to them becoming "superspreaders of misinformation" and making it viral quickly. Hence you must avoid such unintended consequences by following the best practices of being vigilant and informed by reliable sources.
- Exercise vigilance and scepticism: It is important that netizens exercise vigilance and they build cognitive abilities to recognise the red flags of misleading information. You can do so by following the official communication channels, looking for any discrepancy in the content of susceptible information and double-checking its authenticity before sharing it with anyone.
- Verify the information from official sources: Follow the official communication channels of concerned authorities for any kind of information, circulars, notifications etc. In case of finding any piece of information to be susceptible or misleading, intimate it to the relevant authority and the fact-checking organizations.
- Stay in touch with expert organizations: Cybersecurity experts and civil society organisations possess the unique blend of large-scale impact potential and technical expertise. Netizens can stay updated about recent developments in the tech-policy sphere and learn about internet best practices, and measures to counter misinformation through methods such as prebunking, debunking and more.
Connect with CyberPeace
As an expert organisation, we have the ability to educate and empower huge numbers, along with the skills and policy acumen needed to be able to not just make people aware of the problem but also teach them how to solve it for themselves. At CyberPeace we regularly produce fact-check reports, blogs & advisories, and insights on prebunking & debunking measures and capacity-building programs with the aim of empowering netizens at the heart of our initiatives. CyberPeace has established the largest network of CyberPeace Corps volunteers globally. These volunteers play a crucial role in assisting victims, raising awareness, and promoting proactive measures.
References:
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Executive Summary
A video of actor Ranbir Kapoor is being shared on social media amid the ongoing Ganesh festivities across the country. The video is being shared with the claim that Ranbir Kapoor refused to accept prasad on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi. CyberPeace Research found the claim to be misleading. Our research revealed that the viral video is from 2023. At the time, Ranbir Kapoor had attended a Ganpati puja at the T-Series office. After the puja, when he was handed a box of prasad, he gave the box to another person and said that he was on a diet.
Claim:
A user on the social media platform Facebook shared the video with the caption, “Ranbir Kapoor refused to eat prasad, saying, ‘I am on a diet.’” The post link, archive link and screenshot are provided below.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1563843065515757
Fact Check:
To verify the viral claim, we conducted a Google search using relevant keywords. During the search, we found a report published on the Dainik Hindustan website. According to the report, the Ambani family once again hosted a Ganpati celebration.Several Bollywood celebrities, including Salman Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif and Alia Bhatt, attended the event. Photographs from the celebration were also shared on social media. However, the clothes worn by Ranbir Kapoor in the photographs featured in the report are different from those seen in the viral video. The report link and screenshot are provided below.
To verify the viral claim, we conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the video. During the search, we found the same video on the YouTube channel of Gujarati Midday, where it was published on September 25, 2023. The report link and screenshot are provided below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoBwpC-jr5A
According to the video description, actor Ranbir Kapoor, known for his role in the film ‘Animal’, visited the T-Series office for Ganpati darshan. Our research established that the video is from 2023 and is being shared on social media with a misleading claim by presenting it as a recent incident. At the end of our research, we found the same video on the YouTube channel of Ei Samay. It was published on September 25, 2023. The video also contains the same scene seen in the viral clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDsoRu8Aco
Conclusion
Our research found that the viral video is from 2023. At the time, Ranbir Kapoor attended a Ganpati puja at the T-Series office. After the puja, when he was handed a box of prasad, he gave the box to another person and said that he was on a diet.
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Executive Summary:
A post on X (formerly Twitter) has gained widespread attention, featuring an image inaccurately asserting that Houthi rebels attacked a power plant in Ashkelon, Israel. This misleading content has circulated widely amid escalating geopolitical tensions. However, investigation shows that the footage actually originates from a prior incident in Saudi Arabia. This situation underscores the significant dangers posed by misinformation during conflicts and highlights the importance of verifying sources before sharing information.
Claims:
The viral video claims to show Houthi rebels attacking Israel's Ashkelon power plant as part of recent escalations in the Middle East conflict.
Fact Check:
Upon receiving the viral posts, we conducted a Google Lens search on the keyframes of the video. The search reveals that the video circulating online does not refer to an attack on the Ashkelon power plant in Israel. Instead, it depicts a 2022 drone strike on a Saudi Aramco facility in Abqaiq. There are no credible reports of Houthi rebels targeting Ashkelon, as their activities are largely confined to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
This incident highlights the risks associated with misinformation during sensitive geopolitical events. Before sharing viral posts, take a brief moment to verify the facts. Misinformation spreads quickly and it’s far better to rely on trusted fact-checking sources.
Conclusion:
The assertion that Houthi rebels targeted the Ashkelon power plant in Israel is incorrect. The viral video in question has been misrepresented and actually shows a 2022 incident in Saudi Arabia. This underscores the importance of being cautious when sharing unverified media. Before sharing viral posts, take a moment to verify the facts. Misinformation spreads quickly, and it is far better to rely on trusted fact-checking sources.
- Claim: The video shows massive fire at Israel's Ashkelon power plant
- Claimed On:Instagram and X (Formerly Known As Twitter)
- Fact Check: False and Misleading
Introduction
For years, when Meta's automated systems flagged suspected child sexual abuse material on Facebook or Instagram involving an Indian child, that information did not go straight to an Indian police station. It went first to a private, US based nonprofit, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which would then decide how and when to route the relevant details back to law enforcement in the country where the crime actually happened. That indirect chain has now been shortened. In mid September 2026, senior Indian government officials confirmed that Meta had agreed, for the first time among major social media platforms operating in India, to report child sexual abuse cases and details of repeat offenders directly to the cybercrime division of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, commonly known as I4C, under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Google followed within days with a similar commitment of its own.
How the reporting actually worked before this
Under US federal law, Meta and every other American headquartered platform is legally obligated to report CSAM instances to NCMEC, facing criminal liability, financial penalties, and the loss of legal safe harbour protections if they fail to do so. NCMEC would then coordinate with law enforcement agencies in the relevant country. In India's case, that meant a 2019 memorandum of understanding between NCMEC and the National Crime Records Bureau, through which more than 69 lakh CyberTipline reports had reportedly been shared with Indian states and union territories by early 2024. The structural problem was not the volume of reports; it was the layer of institutional distance built into every single one of them. As one government official put it plainly, an Indian law enforcement agency was, in effect, made to wait on a private American nonprofit for information about a crime committed on Indian soil against an Indian child, and NCMEC itself has little to no operational presence in India to manage that handoff quickly.
That distance had real, documented costs. Officials directly linked slow data sharing to delayed CSAM investigations, describing situations where exploitation was actively ongoing while Indian agencies remained one step removed from the account level details, IP addresses, and identifying information that could have accelerated a rescue or an arrest.
What actually changed, and why now
This shift did not emerge from a routine policy review. It followed sustained government pressure through 2026, including a formal inquiry launched by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights into Meta India's child safety policies, multiple summons issued to Meta India head, and a July 2026 controversy in which Meta was found to have run paid Instagram advertisements allegedly directing users toward Telegram channels distributing CSAM.
Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directly raised the direct reporting demand with Meta's Chief of Global Affairs, Joel Kaplan, during a visit to New Delhi in August 2026, and separately questioned whether Meta could still claim to be a "simple intermediary" given that it profits from advertisement placement and exercises systems level control over ad distribution. Under the new arrangement, account level details, including names, associated email addresses, and IP addresses, will now flow directly to I4C, which officials say should meaningfully compress the time between detection and actionable law enforcement response.
Why this is a welcome step, but not a solved problem
There is genuine reason to treat this as meaningful progress. For years, reporting routed through NCMEC meant Indian agencies were effectively once removed from data concerning crimes committed on Indian soil, against Indian children. Direct reporting to I4C shortens that distance and gives investigators quicker access to information that matters most in time sensitive cases, where every day of delay can mean continued access, continued distribution, or a victim who remains unidentified.
That said, this should not be described as a finished problem, and its real value will depend on at least three things.
The first is the depth of data actually shared. Account level details, a name, an email address, an IP address, are a starting point for an investigation, not an end point. Whether the new arrangement includes the kind of contextual detail investigators actually need to build a prosecutable case, rather than simply a faster version of the same limited data packet previously routed through NCMEC, remains to be seen in practice rather than in the announcement itself.
The second is institutional capacity on the receiving end. I4C and state cyber cells will now be positioned to receive a higher volume of reports arriving faster than before, but a faster pipeline only produces better outcomes if the infrastructure receiving it can actually convert that inflow into timely, actionable results on the ground. India's cyber cells have historically been understaffed and unevenly resourced across states, with some districts operating with only a handful of trained personnel handling cybercrime alongside a broad range of other digital offences. A genuinely improved reporting channel could, in that context, simply shift the bottleneck downstream from Washington to a district cyber cell rather than eliminate it, unless the surge in report volume is matched by a corresponding investment in trained staff, forensic capacity, and case management systems capable of prioritising the most time sensitive reports first.
The third is consistency across the industry. Meta and Google have now committed to this model, but whether it extends reliably across every major platform operating in India, rather than remaining an arrangement secured through targeted pressure on one or two companies at a time, will determine whether this becomes a systemic fix or a set of isolated exceptions.
The quieter tension nobody has fully resolved
There is also a more technical reality worth naming honestly. As platforms adopt end to end encryption more broadly, extending it across messaging services and, in some cases, considering it for other content types, the pool of CSAM content that can actually be automatically detected narrows, even as the reporting pipeline for whatever is detected improves. WhatsApp itself has argued in Indian courts, including in its ongoing challenge to the IT Rules' traceability requirements, that end to end encryption and message traceability are close to mutually exclusive, a position echoed by cryptography experts including Signal's Moxie Marlinspike, who has stated plainly that identifying a message's originator at the very least undermines, and likely breaks, the purpose of end to end encryption altogether. Faster reporting channels do not, by themselves, compensate for reduced visibility into content that a platform's own encryption prevents it from scanning in the first place. That tension, between strengthening user privacy through encryption and strengthening child safety through detection, sits underneath this entire announcement and deserves sustained attention from technologists, platforms, and child safety practitioners alike, rather than being treated as resolved simply because reporting speed has improved.
India's National Human Rights Commission has already flagged this directly in its own advisory, recommending that platforms using end to end encryption be required to devise additional protocols or technology specifically to monitor CSAM circulation, an unresolved and technically difficult ask that sits alongside, rather than instead of, the reporting improvements announced this month.
What this actually represents
The most accurate way to characterise this development is as a meaningful first step in platform accountability toward children in India, not a finish line. Meta agreeing to report directly, rather than through a private American intermediary, closes a real structural gap that officials say genuinely delayed investigations. But the task now shifts to India itself: building the institutional capacity at I4C and in state cyber cells to make full use of what is finally being offered, extending the same commitment across the rest of the industry rather than platform by platform, and confronting the encryption question honestly rather than treating faster reporting as a substitute for solving it.
A judicial note worth remembering
It is worth noting that Indian courts pushed for this same sensitivity well before it became routine practice. The Supreme Court, in Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S. Harish, 2024, directed that the term "child pornography" be replaced with "child sexual abuse and exploitation material" across legal and public usage, holding that the word "pornography" wrongly implies consent and normalises what is, in fact, a recorded act of abuse. That judicial insistence on precise language is a useful reminder that reporting frameworks like this one will ultimately be judged not just on speed, but on whether they treat the material, and the children in it, with the gravity courts have already demanded.
References
- https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/meta-agrees-to-share-csam-details-with-indian-law-enforcement-agencies-125091500052_1.html
- https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/google-india-to-share-csam-case-details-with-govt-cybercrime-division-126092101062_1.html
- https://www.storyboard18.com/advertising/ncpcr-summons-meta-india-md-again-over-child-abuse-ads-ws-l-110781.htm
- https://www.superprep.io/current-affairs/meta-report-csam-directly-to-indias-cybercrime-portal
- https://theprint.in/india/specialised-central-police-unit-use-of-technology-to-proactively-detect-csam-nhrc-advisory/1822223/
- https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/whatsapp-delhi-high-court-traceability-end-to-end-encryption-privacy-risk-174743
- https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/traceability-and-endtoend-encryption-cannot-coexist-on-digital-messaging-platforms-experts/66969/1
