Damage A Video Forward Can Do

Just what damage can a video forward on social media do? A school in Bellary can probably answer that best.

Over the past week, Nandi International School in Bellary, about 300 kilometres north of Bangalore, has had visits from the local police and the block education office. It has had scores of Google reviews from people slamming it with abuses. And, its phone lines have been ringing everyday with random callers. All of them, evidently, had seen a video circulated through WhatsApp and Facebook tagged with the message: "nandi residential international school in Karnataka where hostel children are being punished...please spread the message" Only a few of the thousands who viewed the video, it appears, stopped to question it.

It turns out that the outrageous visuals of a man beating up little children and kicking them around were from an orphanage in Egypt in 2014 which had gone viral at the time. News reports online, dating August 2014, have details of how the video surfaced and how it led to the warden's arrest.

Now, however, the staff at Nandi are putting out as many social media messages as they can to clarify that the mischievous forward had nothing to do with their school, along with the link to a Daily Mail piece that reported the actual incident. The school has also filed a complaint with the Bellary police. Strangely though, when the offending posts surfaced sometime last week, it was deja vu for the staff.

It was a year ago, in August 2015 that the same video with their school's name began floating around, says Kumar Reddy, an administrator at Nandi. He recalls that some policemen came to the campus on the evening of August 15, 2015 asking to inspect it because they'd been alerted to the visuals. “After exactly one year, again somebody has started sharing it,” says Reddy. The first time around, he claims, they had tracked it to a person who had put it up on Facebook and had sent her an email, following which the post was taken down. As Reddy puts it, they didn't pursue it further at that time because it all died down shortly after. But it's reached a far greater audience this time, he says, and he's he's getting 15-20 calls everyday because his number is listed in the directory.

“Even last night at twelve, I got a threatening call from a person who had seen the video and was angry about it. I sent the link to him and after a few minutes, he called back to apologise,” Reddy told Outlook on phone on Thursday. The Nandi Group's website says the school, started in 1992, is managed by the Iqbal Ahmed family. Currently, the group runs two schools and a pre-university college in Nandi Nagar, around five kilometres from Bellary town.

Bellary police superintendent R Chethan told Outlook that the school has given them a complaint and an investigation is on.