A photo is being shared widely among the Sri Lankan Tamil community, claimed to be of a woman working in Grama Sevaka office in Poonakary, Jaffna, who was caught having an illicit affair with the Grama Sevaka. However, Fact Crescendo found that the photo being shared is from an old and unrelated incident and while […]
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Social media is flooded with reports about a luxury jeep driven by a daughter of a senior superintendent of police (SSP) crashing into the Nanda Motors Showroom at the Nelum Pokuna roundabout on 15th November. Our investigation confirmed that, the girl whose photos went viral on social media was in fact was not the girl […]
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Many ministers and high-ranking officials who were in power at the time of the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019 are being questioned as the investigation into the terrorist attack progresses. MP Eran Wickramaratne was also summoned for interrogation recently over a statement he had made questioning the security of key witnesses. After which social media […]
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During the first wave of the novel Coronavirus spread in Sri Lanka, health authorities decided that all dead bodies infected with Covid-19 should be cremated. In fact, there has been a lot of talk recently around the topic of burying or cremating Covid-19 infected corpses. While the government has not yet given an official permission […]
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In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, governments and health authorities around the world continue to emphasize the importance of social distancing to combat the spread of the virus. In fact, various awareness programs are being implemented around the world to help educate the public. In this backdrop, a series of viral social media posts […]
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Online hoaxes and scams are aplenty on the internet and social media seems to be its breeding ground. At Fact Crescendo we are always on the alert for such online frauds, including this post published last April by a Facebook page claiming to be an official page of BMW in Sri Lanka with over 26,000 […]
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We recently discovered a series of posts going viral around the same topic across social media, which claimed to be related to a research conducted by the University of Oxford. The claim however seemed unsubstantiated and was in turn made into memes when posting. Our first sighting of the viral claim was on Instagram, posted […]
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Since the advent of the internet, the spam messages have kept on evolving to newer forms. From email spam to social spam and spam received on messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Viber have taken over the spam game. Some spam takes on timely and topical themes, similar to a WhatsApp spam message currently circulating […]
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People tend to share fake social media forwards and from time to time the same message gets circulated among many thousands of people – sometimes more. Often these messages are spread via messenger platforms like Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp and Viber. Recently, a similar message being spread on WhatsApp caught our attention. The message, which stated […]
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The 1800s in Europe was considered an age of wonder. With the advent of the industrial revolution and phenomena like trade fairs and human zoos, cleverly disguised as ethnographic expositions, the European public were introduced to the concept of the ‘the other’; humans of different races and those considered particularly different to the norm. This […]
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