Fake news comes back to haunt Swara Bhasker, actress issues clarification

Swara Bhasker had created quite a stir when she penned an open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali and said that she felt reduced to vagina after watching his magnum opus Padmaavat. She had received plenty of hate messages and was trolled mercilessly for her letter. However, she was unfazed by all the negativity and stood by her opinion.

And once again, the Veere Di Wedding actress has found herself at the receiving end of trolls for her 'I feel reduced to a burning woman' remark which she never really make.

A parody Twitter account of Republic TV has twisted Swara Bhasker's 'reduced to vagina' quote and reconstructed it to make it look satirical.

The tweet read, "#BREAKING : I feel reduced to 'a burning woman' whenever i see people celebrating #RamNavami , the birth of Rama who asked Sita for Agni pariksha : Swara Bhaskar."

And as fake news makes more noise on social media, it didn't take long for a certain section of Twitter users to slam the actress without putting in any effort to verify the authenticity of the news.

And there were many more.

However, there were many who realized that the Twitter account, from which the tweet was sent, was fake. They jumped to Swara's defense and tried to alert other Twitter users about the parody account insisting that the actress never really said such things on any platform. They also asked the actress to report the account to cyber crime cell.

Though it was an old tweet, it recently picked up pace and went viral on social media. As soon as the tweet came to Swara's notice, she immediately decided to clear the air on Twitter to avoid unnecessary and unwanted attention.

She wrote, "And while the profile of the handle clarified that @republicTv is a parody account & tweets are fake.. Judging from the RTs I thought I should clarify that I NEVER SAID THIS.. FAKE!!!!! Apparently satire but honestly guys I get enough hate without help from you :)."

Earlier, a fake quote which read, "being raped by an invader and become their sex slave is way better than committing jauhar (suicide) to avoid that life" was attributed to Swara Bhasker by the Twitter handle of ShankhNaad.net, which is notorious for planting fake news on social media.

As the quote was widely circulated on social media, Swara immediately called out ShankhNaad's lie and demanded to publish an official apology and also threatened with a lawsuit.

Rattled by Swara's outrage, ShankhNaad deleted the tweet and apologized to her on Twitter.

Speaking to Alt News, Swara had said, "This meme by ShankhNaad is an utter and blatant lie. I have literally not used these words strung next to each other in any utterance nor anything I've ever said or written in public or in private. I think this perverse, wilful twisting of my article and the argument in the article has been done to serve the hateful and poisonous motives of Shanknaad and it reeks of vicious intent. It's scary and shameful that a politely worded review of a film should be twisted for such sinister purposes. I think this amounts to criminal defamation."