Fact-Check: Shefali Vaidya posts a misleading image of the supposed conditions of women in Taliban

Shefali Vaidya is a popular Indian author who has 5 lakh followers on Twitter. Shefali regularly posts about her views on politics and society. On August 18, Shefali posted a picture of what looked like a man with two women in chains and wearing burqas. Her caption seemed to suggest that this is an image coming out of the currently Taliban occupied Afghanistan.

The tweet currently has over 11,000 likes and has been retweeted over 3,400 times.

Fact-check:

Upon reverse searching the image on google, we found that this particular image has been used hundreds of times by people claiming this to be the Taliban. The earliest instance of this image can be found on October 16,2014. We found several news media outlets’ coverage of this image and discovered that this image came from a protest in London against ISIS. The protest was organised by Kurdish activists who wanted to highlight the slave trade undertaken by Islamic State.

Therefore, this claim made by Shefali is false and misleading. There is a massive volume of information coming out of Afghanistan right now, and we must be vigilant and be able to tell what is fake and what is not.

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DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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