The news of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan being in critical condition has been spreading on social media like wildfire. The claim was made by the website of a news organisation and was shared with a sick-looking picture of the superstar. India TV fact check team has checked the authenticity of the news and found it to be misleading.
What is the viral news?
The team came across a picture shared by the website 'Big24' on January 1, 2024. The headline of the article reads, "Bachchan family unable to stop tears, everyone distressed after Amitabh Bachchan's health turns serious." The news is accompanied by a picture of Bachchan who appears to be very sick along with a sad image of his son Abhishek Bachchan.
The viral image of Amitabh Bachchan
When we read the story we came across a sentence in the second paragraph that said, "According to a huge developement Abhishek Bachchan has lost hopes of his father surviving as the doctors who have been assigned to him have lost confidence and hope.
In the fourth paragraph, it was written, "What happened was that during the shooting of a film, Amitabh Bachchan suffered a stroke, after which he was admitted. Even the doctors who treated him had given up hope of his survival."
India TV fact check finds the news to be fake
When we read this entire news carefully, we realized that nowhere was it written about Amitabh Bachchan being ill recently or being admitted to the hospital. Along with this, there was no mention as to when this incident of Amitabh's serious condition happened and from where this news was received. Therefore, we doubted the authenticity of this news and did a Google search.
During investigation, we did not find any news on any major news portal about Amitabh Bachchan being ill or being admitted to the hospital. If the news of Amitabh being ill four days ago had been true, then news channels and all the newspapers and websites across the country would have been filled with this news, but we did not find such news anywhere.
Reverse search shows image to be old
After this, we tried to get to the bottom of both the photographs used in this news. When we did a reverse search on the thumbnail photo of the news article with the help of Google Lens, a YouTube video of the trailer of Abhishek Bachchan's film 'Dasvi' surfaced. The thumbnail of this trailer had the same photo which was used in the thumbnail of the viral news.
Meanwhile, the reverse search of Amitabh Bachchan's picture on Google turned out to be from a news article in Times Of India dated 29 November 2005. The headline of this news is - Big B gets stomach ache. The pictures used in this report match the viral news. Hence, it became clear that the photo of Amitabh Bachchan posted in the viral news is from the year 2005, when he had stomach pain.
The actual image of a sick Amitabh Bachchan as posted by Times of India.
What was the conclusion of the fact check?
India TV's investigation revealed that the viral news is completely misleading and the information given in it has no authenticity. Also, the pictures used in it are old.
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